How people with IA perceive and understand patient activation
Research type
Research Study
Full title
How do people at different levels of patient activation (as captured using the Patient Activation Measure) perceive and understand patient activation over time?
IRAS ID
219233
Contact name
Bethan Jones
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
UWE, Health & Applied Sciences
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 10 months, 1 days
Research summary
Research indicates that there are a variety of factors that can impact how engaged someone is managing their health, and one of these is a concept called patient activation (Hibbard et al., 2004). It is defined as how willing and able someone is to take an active role in dealing with their health (Hibbard and Greene, 2013).
Higher levels of activation are associated with fewer emergency hospital admissions, fewer days as an inpatient and lower healthcare costs (Hibbard et al., 2015). Therefore, there is a value in understanding activation to reduce strain on the NHS. For individuals, people who are more activated are also more likely to stick to their treatment schedules, and have better outcomes overall (McCusker et al., 2016).
This project intends to identify how patients with inflammatory arthritis understand patient activation, how active they feel they are in managing their health and the qualities that they believe are important to do so. Finding out people’s experiences of learning to actively manage their health, and how this changes over time will increase understanding of patient activation in these contexts.
Participants who are patients living with inflammatory arthritis, accessing treatment and care at two NHS rheumatology services, and who meet the sampling requirements, will be invited to meet with a researcher (Bethan Jones) for two separate face to face interviews. The second interview will take place approximately twelve months after the first, to be able to identify changes over time.
This study (funded with a PhD scholarship from Arthritis Research UK) will contribute to the development of a framework to describe patient activation in inflammatory arthritis.
REC name
West of Scotland REC 4
REC reference
17/WS/0143
Date of REC Opinion
2 Aug 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion