North Staffordshire Health Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The North Staffordshire and Stoke Survey of Adult Health and Linked Healthcare
IRAS ID
187604
Contact name
Ross Wilkie
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
With people living longer there is now an urgent need to reduce the effect of long term health conditions (for example osteoarthritis, dementia) on the growing number of people with them. There is also a need to prevent these conditions, and build more public health activities into the healthcare system. This research proposal aims to improve our understanding of the impact of long-term health conditions and identify factors that can be either prevent or managed to improve quality of life.
The proposal aims to build on our existing reputation for research using medical records, which only uses information from people who have given their permission to do so. However, the information collected in medical records only tells us if people have a health condition and does not allow researchers to answer many important health questions relevant to long-term conditions (for example, how does it affect people?). Without joining up information on disability, mood, the severity of some symptoms and information on what may cause these symptoms, our understanding of the impact of these conditions, the outcomes of healthcare, and what to target to improve health is hampered.
Our research proposal is to collect information by questionnaire in a survey of adults across North Staffordshire and link this to medical records (only for those who give their permission to do so). We will ask local people to help us to develop and test the questionnaire. We will then send the questionnaire to all adults aged 25 and over who are registered with 7 general practices (approximately 50000 people). We expect around 16,000 people to respond in total and this will provide information which will allow us to help trainee doctors to do research and gain a better understanding of the health of people in North Staffordshire.REC name
North West - Greater Manchester East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/NW/0735
Date of REC Opinion
22 Sep 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion