Finding the best moisturiser for eczema – the impact research can have on everyday lives

Zoe Wilkins

 

 

by Zoe Wilkins, Trial Administrator, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol

It’s safe to say that I knew little about eczema before working as an administrator on the Best Emollients for Eczema (BEE) trial and even less so about emollients, the different types of moisturiser used to treat the condition.

My own children occasionally suffered with very mild eczema; tiny patches here and there that would clear up with a couple of days of moisturisation. So, it was only after starting work on the trial that I began to understand the complexity of this condition. Some suffer seasonal ‘flare-ups’, for others year-round torment, which can be triggered by many different factors.

Although I knew that if you had eczema it was important to keep skin moisturised, I had not heard of the word ‘emollient’ before. Emollient is the medical word for moisturiser and comes in … Read more

Involving advanced heart failure patients in shaping research questions: A Priority Setting Partnership

 

by Dr Rachel Johnson, NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Primary Health Care, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol and Anna King, NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Evaluation of Interventions at the University of Bristol

 

Our Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) began as the idea of a group of doctors who have witnessed how difficult the experience of heart failure can be for patients and their families. Heart failure is one of the commonest causes of unplanned hospital admissions, and it can place a heavy burden on carers and families.

Our aim was to put the needs of patients, carers and health professionals at the heart of the research agenda. We followed the methods of the James Lind Alliance Heart (JLA), a not for profit organisation set up to ‘open up discussion between patients and clinicians to agree on priorities for future research.

The PSP … Read more

Including the views and experiences of parents and children in a clinical trial: The Best Emollient for Eczema (BEE) Study

Dr Eileen Sutton

 

 

By Dr Eileen Sutton, Research Fellow and Trial Coordinator – BEE Study, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol

Qualitative research in trials

Many clinical trials now include qualitative research methods – which can include interviews, focus groups, or observations – alongside clinical and survey data collection. These kinds of research methods can be used to help the design of trials or to help us understand what is going on when a treatment or service is delivered in a clinical trial. For example, we can interview research participants to find out more about how they have used or experienced a treatment, in much more detail than we could capture in a survey. Combining different research methods can help researchers to get a more complete picture.

Our research

Around 20% of children in the UK experience eczema, which is characterised by dry, itchy skin. Eczema can … Read more

Worried about asking people to take part in research? Don’t be!

by Dr Alison Gregory
Research Fellow (Traumatised and Vulnerable Populations), Senior Research Associate
Centre for Academic Primary Care
@AlisonGregory73

When I first became a health researcher, I felt that people would see taking part in research as a bother, a pain, or a waste of their time and that, by association, they would see me as akin to a nuisance caller, intent on coercing them into some unwanted activity. Thankfully, after 10 years doing research, it’s become apparent to me that this is far from the truth.

For a start, the tentativeness with which most of the researchers I know proceed as they recruit participants is anything but a hard-sell. In fact, due to necessarily stringent ethics and governance processes and practices, strict eligibility criteria, and a healthy dose of ‘only wanting to do what’s best for people’, we are possibly more in danger of being talked out of taking … Read more

We need to think about treatment journeys when evaluating complex interventions

by Dr Katrina Turner
Senior Lecturer
Centre for Academic Primary Care
@DrKMTurner

 

Most clinical trials are pragmatic in nature and aim to assess the effectiveness of a new treatment against ‘treatment as usual’. When interpreting trial results, researchers tend to focus primarily on what treatment participants in different trial arms received. This may be difficult in the usual care arm, as this arm is often poorly defined, whereas the intervention arm is often clearly defined prior to the trial starting. In addition, this focus is very narrow. Treatment is a process and patients’ experiences of accessing and receiving care could also influence their treatment outcomes, and thus the trial’s results.

A paper recently published in Trials  highlights that differences do exist between the experiences of participants randomised to usual care and intervention arms. These differences relate not only to what treatment participants receive, but also how they access and … Read more