Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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Developing a feasible and sensitive evaluation strategy for a new mental health service is a challenge that requires consideration of what a service is trying to achieve and what a 'good' outcome might look like. Perinatal mental illnesses are complex in their causes and treatment. Mother Baby Units provide specialist perinatal mental health care to parents experiencing mental illness in the perinatal period, with evaluations demonstrating clinical and social outcomes. There has however been remarkably little research on how MBUs achieve these outcomes. ⋯ Articulating the approach to evaluation provides a contribution to evaluation knowledge for others evaluating complex public health interventions. The relational nature of perinatal mental health experiences challenges individualistic approaches to care delivery, funding and evaluation. As part of service establishment, there is a need to consider what a 'good' outcome of care might be and to develop evaluation approaches that capture the relational components of recovery as well as the factors that support families to sustain change.
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Neck pain is a major cause of disability worldwide, and current rehabilitation strategies show limited effectiveness. Subgrouping patients by their primary pain and disability drivers can help tailor treatments. At this end, the Pain and Disability Drivers Management (PDDM) was developed and has demonstrated preliminary effectiveness in the management of low back pain. Nevertheless, the PDDM model was only validated for this population. Adapting this framework to patients with neck pain would provide a more global view of the patient's experience of pain and support a genuine biopsychosocial intervention. ⋯ Through a modified DELPHI study, the PDDM model was updated and adapted to people with neck pain. Subsequent steps include clinical integration and measures of efficacy when used for assessment/treatment.
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Prostate cancer (PCa) represents the fifth cause of death in the male population worldwide. The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test demonstrated poor accuracy to assess the presence of PCa. Thus, the PSA testing paradigm should be moved from the systematic screening approach to the early identification of men who are harbouring clinically significant disease. Accurate clinical-based tools to predict PCa should therefore be developed for general practice. We derived and validated a PCa predictive score using a primary care data source. ⋯ The PCa-HScore might guide the prescription of PSA and/or other clinical strategies in those men reporting certain levels of risk. A related decision support system could therefore be implemented in primary care.
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The shift of treatment of paediatric cancer patients to include more care at home puts a lot of pressure on health care professionals (HCPs) to prepare and train parents on safe and correct drug handling at home. Parents must take in and understand the information presented to them while coping with their own fear related to their child's cancer diagnosis. In Sweden, parents are expected to handle and manipulate oral anticancer drugs (OADs) in the home setting. There is however a lack of a standardized method to inform and educate parents on how to handle OADs in a correct way at home. ⋯ This educational intervention study shows promising results for the method used by HCPs to inform and educate parents on complicated topics such as handling OADs at home.
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Comparative Study
A Comparison of Patient Self-Reported Fatigue in the FRAIL Scale With a Validated Fatigue Measure.
The FRAIL scale is a self-administered tool used to screen for frailty in clinical, community and long-term nursing settings. Patient's self-reporting of fatigue in the FRAIL scale may raise concerns of subjectivity and accuracy in frailty assessment. ⋯ Patient-reported fatigue largely reflects validated measure of fatigue. Physicians should therefore be encouraged to use the FRAIL scale to assess frailty.