1,721,091 research outputs found
Making sense of technology adoption in healthcare: meso-level considerations
Full text linkIt has been clear for some time that the development of telecare faces significant problems. Large scale studies and clinical trials seem to suggest that the cost and clinical effectiveness of telecare systems is doubtful, and the claim that these systems empower or enable service users often seems greatly overstated. The question that stems from this is, can these problems be overcome? Greenhalgh et al. have critiqued the construction of telecare as a generalised technological solution to problems of the delivery of care and have offered a new framework for defining quality in telecare and telehealth. They outline a set of principles that focus on user-centredness, co-creation, integration, and evaluation. This is a valuable approach, and is part of a much wider transformation of the way in which policy and practice researchers conceptualise healthcare delivery as a problem of performativity. Recognising that this is an important shift, in this paper I argue that we also need to keep in mind the meso-level factors that structure new technology applications in practice. Please see the related article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0279-6
How do illness identity, patient workload and agentic capacity interact to shape patient and caregiver experience? Comparative analysis of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Full text linkSome patients have to work hard to manage their illness. When this work outweighs capacity (the resources available to patients to undertake the illness workload and other workloads such as that of daily life), this may result in treatment burden, associated with poor health outcomes for patients. This cross-sectional, comparative qualitative analysis uses an abductive approach to identify, characterise and explain treatment burden in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer. It uses complementary qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews with patients receiving specialist care n = 19, specialist clinicians n = 5; non-participant observation of specialist outpatient consultations in two English hospitals [11 h, 52 min] n = 41). The findings underline the importance of the diagnostic process in relation to treatment burden; whether diagnosis is experienced as a biographically disruptive shock (as with lung cancer) or is insidiously biographically erosive (as with COPD)
Patients’ influence on doctors’ behavior: a case study of patient strategies in somatization
No full textObjective: Extensive empirical data and theory describe the inequality of power in relations between doctors and their patients. However, the focus has been on the ways in which doctors control the doctor-patient relationship. This has meant that the extent to which patients influence the consultation, and the ways in which they do this, have been neglected. Methods: In this article, we use a single case to identify and illustrate distinct ways in which patients exert power to determine the outcome of consultations. Conclusion: This analysis leads to a more powerful explanation than is presently available to understand the somatization of psychological needs. According to this, the patient organizes strategies, which include the presentation of emotional and social distress, around a biomedical model. Because of their prior decisions as to their role, doctors permit themselves to be trapped in this model
Implementation, context and complexity
Full text linkBackground: Context is a problem in research on health behaviour change, knowledge translation, practice implementation and health improvement. This is because many intervention and evaluation designs seek to eliminate contextual confounders, when these represent the normal conditions into which interventions must be integrated if they are to be workable in practice.Discussion: We present an ecological model of the ways that participants in implementation and health improvement processes interact with contexts. The paper addresses the problem of context as it affects processes of implementation, scaling up and diffusion of interventions. We extend our earlier work to develop Normalisation Process Theory and show how these processes involve interactions between mechanisms of resource mobilisation, collective action and negotiations with context. These mechanisms are adaptive. They contribute to self-organisation in complex adaptive systems.Conclusion: Implementation includes the translational efforts that take healthcare interventions beyond the closed systems of evaluation studies into the open systems of ‘real world’ contexts. The outcome of these processes depends on interactions and negotiations between their participants and contexts. In these negotiations, the plasticity of intervention components, the degree of participants’ discretion over resource mobilisation and actors’ contributions, and the elasticity of contexts, all play important parts. Understanding these processes in terms of feedback loops, adaptive mechanisms and the practical compromises that stem from them enables us to see the mechanisms specified by NPT as core elements of self-organisation in complex systems.<br/
Cognitive authority theory: reframing health inequity, disadvantage and privilege in palliative and end-of-life care
Full text linkBackground: there persist disparities in access to quality palliative and end-of-life care, often based on avoidable injustice. Research and theory to explain this health inequity focuses on structural or individual-based factors, overlooking important relational factors between health professionals, patients and families.Aim: to apply Cognitive Authority Theory in palliative and end-of-life care to explain neglected relational drivers of inequity in access and experience.Methods: cognitive Authority Theory, a middle-range theory of power relations between individuals and authority over knowledge, was developed from empirical and review data. This paper demonstrates its utility in explaining an overlooked component of inequity in palliative care: interactions between health professionals and patients/caregivers.Results: using examples from the palliative care literature, we characterise how people who are socially disadvantaged have fewer resources to exploit during consultations with health professionals which makes it difficult for them to have their voices heard, their choices prioritised by others, and to express their expertise. We examine the implications of health professionals’ judgements of expertise for care access, experience, involvement and appropriateness. We offer a fresh perspective on the mechanisms by which stereotypes, bias and power imbalances between health professionals and patients reinforce existing health inequities, drawing on the role of social privilege in shaping inequity in palliative care.Conclusion: this paper provides a new language to articulate relational drivers of inequity in palliative care. It explains how to use Cognitive Authority Theory to design and interpret research to determine how healthcare interactions reinforce both social privilege and social disadvantage at end-of-life
What is the patient acceptability of real time 1:1 videoconferencing in an orthopaedics setting? A systematic review
No full textBackground: Real time 1:1 videoconferencing (VC) has the potential to play an important role in the management of orthopaedic pathologies. Despite positive reporting of telemedicine studies uptake in clinical practice remains low. Acceptability to patients is an important element of system take-up in telemedicine and a focus towards qualitative methodology may explore the underlying reasons behind its acceptability. In this paper we have systematically reviewed qualitative studies that include evidence about patient responses to VC services in an orthopaedic setting. Objectives: To determine whether real time 1:1 videoconferencing is acceptable to patients in an orthopaedic setting. Data sources: MEDLINE, AMED, PsychINFO, CINAHL, SCOPUS, Cochrane Database, Evidence Search and Open Grey were searched with forwards and backwards reference screening of eligible papers. Eligibility criteria: Qualitative studies exploring the acceptability of VC in an orthopaedic setting were included. Study appraisal and synthesis methods: Studies were appraised using the CASP tool. A Directed Content Framework Analysis was conducted using Normalisation Process Theory. Results: Four studies were included for review. The themes for the four studies did not overlap and did not report clinician acceptability of VC. The Directed Content Analysis of these papers using Normalisation Process Theory highlighted factors which contribute towards its acceptability. Conclusions: All studies concluded that the use of VC was acceptable. Further qualitative research exploring both patient and clinician acceptability is required utilising a theoretical framework to allow for repeatability and generalisability. Systematic Review Registration Number: PROSPERO CRD42015024944.</p
Experiences of abortion: a narrative review of qualitative studies
Full text linkBackground: Although abortion or termination of pregnancy (TOP) has become an increasingly normalized component of women's health care over the past forty years, insufficient attention has been paid to women's experiences of surgical or medical methods of TOP.Objective: To undertake a narrative review of qualitative studies of women's experiences of TOP and their perspectives on surgical or medical methods.Methods: Keyword searches of Medline, CINAHL, ISI, and IBSS databases. Manual searches of other relevant journals and reference lists of primary articles.Results: Qualitative studies (n = 18) on women's experiences of abortion were identified. Analysis of the results of studies reviewed revealed three main themes: experiential factors that promote or inhibit the choice to seek TOP; experiences of TOP; and experiential aspects of the environment in which TOP takes place.Conclusion: Women's choices about TOP are mainly pragmatic ones are related to negotiating finite personal and family and emotional resources. Women who are well informed and supported in their <br/
Remote doctors and absent Patients: acting at a distance in telemedicine?
No full textAccording to policy makers, telemedicine offers “huge opportunities to improve the quality and accessibility of health services.” It is defined as diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, with doctors and patients separated by space (and usually time) but mediated through information and communication technologies. This mediation is explored through an ethnography of a U.K. teledermatology clinic. Diagnostic image transfer enables medicine at a distance, as patients are removed from knowledge generation by concentrating their identities into images. Yet that form of identity allows images and the expert gaze to be brought into potentially lifesaving proximity. Following Latour’s thread, images must be captured and then mobilized to the knowledge base, where they must be stabilized into standard diagnoses, then combined with different images, waiting lists, skin lesions, dermatologists, paper records, and beds, so that ultimately, outcomes are produced. This huge task requires new knowledges and a widening of agency that, if unacknowledged, may see telemedicine projects continue to founder
Patient, clinician and manager experience of the accelerated implementation of virtual consultations following COVID‐19: a qualitative study of preferences in a tertiary orthopaedic rehabilitation setting
Full text linkAim: to investigate the experiences of patients, clinicians and managers during the accelerated implementation of virtual consultations (VCs) due to COVID-19. To understand how patient preferences are constructed and organized.Methods: semi-structured interviews with patients, clinicians and managerial staff at a single specialist orthopaedic centre in the United Kingdom. The interview schedule and coding frame were based on Normalisation Process Theory. Interviews were conducted over the telephone or by video call. Abductive analysis of interview transcripts extended knowledge from previous research to identify, characterize and explain how patient preferences for VC were formed and arranged.Results: fifty-five participants were included (20 patients, 20 clinicians, 15 managers). Key mechanisms that contribute to the formation of patient preferences were identified. These were: (a) context for the consultation (normative expectations, relational expectations, congruence and potential); (b) the available alternatives and the implementation process (coherence, cognitive participation, collective action and reflexive monitoring). Patient preferences are mediated by the clinician and organisational preferences through the influence of the consultation context, available alternatives and the implementation process.Conclusions: this study reports the cumulative analysis of five empirical studies investigating patient preferences for VC before and during the COVID-19 pandemic as VC transitioned from an experimental clinic to a compulsory form of service delivery. This study has identified mechanisms that explain how preferences for VC come about and how these relate to organisational and clinician preferences. Since clinical pathways are shaped by interactions between patient, clinicians and organisational preferences, future service design must strike a balance between patient preferences and the preferences of clinicians and organisations.Patient and Public Contribution: the CONNECT Project Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) group provided guidance on the conduct and design of the research. This took place with remote meetings between the lead researcher and the chair of the PPI group during March and April 2020. Patient information documentation and the interview schedule were developed with the PPI group to ensure that these were accessible
The nursing work of hospital-based clinical practice guideline implementation: an explanatory systematic review using normalisation process theory
No full textObjective: To investigate the dynamics of nurses’ work in implementing Clinical Practice Guidelines.Design: Hybrid: systematic review techniques used to identify qualitative studies of clinical guideline implementation; theory-led and structured analysis of textual data.Data sources: CINAHL, CSA Illumina, EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Sociological Abstracts.Methods: Systematic review of qualitative studies of the implementation of Clinical Practice Guidelines, analysed using Directed Content Analysis, and interpreted in the light of Normalisation Process Theory.Results: Seven studies met the inclusion criteria of the review. These revealed that clinical practice guidelines are disposed to normalisation when: (a) They are associated with activities that practitioners can make workable in practice, and practitioners are able to integrate it into their collective workflow. (b) When they are differentiated from existing clinical practice by its proponents, and when claims of differentiation are regarded as legitimate by their potential users. (c) When they are associated with an emergent community of practice, and when members of that community of practice enrol each other into group processes that specify their engagement with it. (d) When they are associated with improvements in the collective knowledge of its users, and when users are able to integrate the application of that knowledge into their individual workflow. And, (e) when nurses can minimise disruption to behaviour norms and agreed professional roles, and mobilise structural and cognitive resources in ways that build shared commitments across professional boundaries.Conclusions: This review demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of theory-led review of studies of nursing practice, and proposes a dynamic model of implementation. Normalisation Process Theory supports the analysis of nursing work. It characterises mechanisms by which work is made coherent and meaningful, is formed around sets of relational commitments, is enacted and contextualised, and is appraised and reconfigured. It facilitates such analysis from within the frame of nursing knowledge and practice itself
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