Category / Health, Wellbeing & Society

Public Health in Nepal: Vitamine A

international, open access, Publishing

Vit AThis week we published an editorial in the Journal of Biomedical Sciences on the question: “Is early diagnose for Vitamin A deficiency better than the current supplementation programme of Nepal?”
The editorial concludes that prevention is still better than cure, but instead of a mass Vitamin A supplementation in Nepal, we need a health promotion intervention aiming to increase the intake of relatively cheap vegetables and fruit (containing β carotene). In addition we need better surveillance and help to identify children with Vitamin A Deficiency and provide them with Vitamin A supplements. The primary focus should be on adopting sustainable food based approaches to combat vitamin A deficiency. In Public Health terms: rather than a blanket coverage of Vitamin A supplementation to whole population we should consider a targeted intervention aimed at those who need it most.

Reference:
Simkhada P, Sathian B, Adhikari S, van Teijlingen E, Roy B. (2015) Is early diagnose for Vitamin A deficiency better than the current supplementation programme of Nepal?. J Biomed Sci. 2(4):28-30.
http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/JBS/index

Harding & Pritchard paper has over 1,000 views in first month it is openly available

Publishing

cover_enThe Harding and Pritchard paper titled ‘UK and Twenty Comparable Countries GDP-Expenditure on Health 1980-2013: The Historic and Continued Low Priority of UK Health-Related Expenditure’, and published in the International Journal of Health Policy and Management, has had over 1,000 views in the first month it has been openly available.

For the majority of that time it has been made available in press, and only in the last few days has it been assigned to an issue. The paper illustrates the UK’s low proportional spend in relation to health related services:

It is well-established that for a considerable period the United Kingdom has spent proportionally less of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health-related services than almost any other comparable country. Average European spending on health (as a % of GDP) in the period 1980 to 2013 has been 19% higher than the United Kingdom, indicating that comparable countries give far greater fiscal priority to its health services, irrespective of its actual fiscal value or configuration. While the UK National Health Service (NHS) is a comparatively lean healthcare system, it is often regarded to be at a ‘crisis’ point on account of low levels of funding. Indeed, many state that currently the NHS has a sizeable funding gap, in part due to its recently reduced GDP devoted to health but mainly the challenges around increases in longevity, expectation and new medical costs. The right level of health funding is a political value judgement. As the data in this paper outline, if the UK ‘afforded’ the same proportional level of funding as the mean averageEuropean country, total expenditure would currently increase by one-fifth.

Fieldwork preparation in Nepal

international, PG research

If you have a number of research projects running in the same location it pays to combine some of the preparation.  Thus as part of five different studies and one PhD project, I’m currently in Kathmandu.  The projects are (1) the THET-funded intervention in Nawalparasi; (2) the CEL-funded qualitative research led by Dr. Catherine Angell on CPD (Continuous Professional Development); (3) the FHSS-funded project on transgender which is led by Dr. Pramod Regmi; (4) the FHSS-funded project with Pourakhi which supports Nepali women returning home after having been abroad as migrant workers;  and (5) the Green Tara Trust funded project on improving maternal health care in Dhading and Nawalparasi, and the FHSS PhD project is that of Mrs. Preeti Mahato.  Two of the project and the PhD topcic are closely related as all three cover maternity care in one for or another in Nawalparasi.  The planning meetings we are having in Nepal involve planning training sessions and workshops, resource allocation and research preparation.DSCN0026

Fortunately, it is not all work.  Today I enjoyed Kheer (Achar and Chana) for lunch in the Green Tara flat in Kathmandu a lovely rice pudding with slightly sour green vegetables and chick peas (see photo).  The actual meal is traditionally health tomorrow but as this is the weekend the staff brought it one day forward so that I could join in too.

Finally, I like to thank colleagues who gave me mobile phones and a camera.  One of the mobile phones is already in use by one of the Nepali charity workers in Kathmandu. I bought a new battery and memory card for camera in the UK and it is working fine, the photo with this blog has been taken with the donated camera!

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (writing from Nepal).

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health Research

 

Making the Most of Writing Week Part 7: BUCRU – not just for Writing Week!

Guidance, writing

We’re coming to the end of Writing Week in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences and by now you will have made a good start or have put the finishing touches to your academic writing projects. Over the last week, we have given you some tips on writing grant applications and highlighted some of the expertise within BUCRU. If you didn’t get the chance to pop in and see us we thought it would be useful to remind you what we’re about and how we can help.

Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) supports researchers in improving the quality, quantity and efficiency of research across the University and local National Health Service (NHS) Trusts. We do this by:

  • Helping researchers develop high quality applications for external research funding (including small grants)
  • Ongoing involvement in funded research projects
  • A “pay-as-you-go” consultation service for other work.

How can we help?

BUCRU can provide help in the following areas:

  • Study design
  • Quantitative and qualitative research methods
  • Statistics, data management and data analysis
  • Patient and public involvement in research
  • Trial management
  • Ethics, governance and other regulatory issues
  • Linking University and NHS researchers

Our support is available to Bournemouth University staff and people working locally in the NHS, and depending on the support you require, is mostly free of charge. There are no general restrictions on topic area or professional background of the researcher.

If you would like support in developing your research please get in touch through bucru@bournemouth.ac.uk or by calling us on 01202 961939. Please see our website for further information, details of our current and previous projects and a link to our recent newsletter.

Making the Most of Writing Week Part 6: What to do with your data

writing

You don’t have to spend Writing Week working on grant applications. You may already have a dataset and now you finally have some time to do something with it. But where to start? It’s often a good idea to go back to your original research questions/aims/objectives. As we said yesterday, a well thought out research question can help shape your analysis strategy.
Hopefully you will have a record of which variables you were measuring and how data were coded. Were any calculations performed using the raw data to create new variables? How were these done? This is all part of good data management. To find out more visit the information pages created by the Library and Learning Support Team.
Once you are reacquainted with your data, it’s often a good idea (in the case of quantitative data) to start plotting graphs to find out more. Always keep in mind the original aims of the study, it’s easy to wander down a path of distraction. If you are feeling confused by all of this or, have got yourself lost down a data track, the BUCRU team are at hand to help.
Peter Thomas is available on Tuesday and Wednesday while Sharon Docherty is available Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Why not drop us an email or pop by to see us in R505?

Knowledge mobilisation research fellowships – NIHR

Funding opportunities

NIHR

The National Institute of Health Research invites applications for its knowledge mobilisation research fellowships. These fellowships support innovative and creative proposals that seek to improve the effective use of health research knowledge within NHS or other public healthcare settings and simultaneously study implementation processes and impacts.

Proposals must be grounded in knowledge mobilisation theory. Fellowships should be used to:

•develop and enhance the understanding of knowledge mobilisation in healthcare;

•develop new ways of sharing existing research findings;

•enhance existing knowledge mobilisation mechanisms;

•shape new research questions of particular and timely relevance to the NHS;

•enhance the capability of the fellow to facilitate networking between researchers and potential research users.

Individual researchers working in healthcare or academic organisations may apply.

Further details, including full eligibility criteria, can be found in the relevant guidance notes for applicants.

Full details of this programme can be found here.

If you are interested in submitting to  this call  you must contact your  RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, you can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in  RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

Making the Most of Writing Week Part 5: Designing your study

writing

So you have formed a strong team, chosen a funder and involved some service users to help develop a research idea with impact. What’s next?
Step 5 is designing your study. The heart of a good piece of research is a strong research question with clear aims and achievable objectives. Sounds easy, right? This is often one of the most difficult aspects of any research project. If you then add having to align your ideas with the priorities of your chosen funder, this task becomes a bit more difficult. However, it is worth the effort. Spending time putting together well constructed research questions will make designing the rest of the study much easier and will even help you formulate your data analysis strategy.
If all of this sounds a bit daunting, never fear because BUCRU are at hand to help. Did you know that some of the members of BUCRU form the Bournemouth branch of NIHR Research Design Service (RDS)? The RDS is here to advise and provide practical support for anyone developing a research grant application to a national, peer reviewed funding competition in the fields of applied health or social care. You can find the Bournemouth team in Royal London House.
If you need help with the design of your study (particularly if it is quantitative) Peter Thomas is available on Tuesday and Wednesday while Sharon Docherty is available Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Why not drop us an email or pop by to see us in R505?

Making the Most of Writing Week Part 4: Research grant applications – not THAT PPI

Guidance, writing

With the start of FHSS writing week, we are continuing our series of blogs providing you with some (hopefully) useful advice on how to make the best of this dedicated time. Remember, there are members of the BUCRU team available during this week to help you (i.e. anyone interested in health research) along the way.

Once you have decided on a funder, an important (but sometimes overlooked) aspect of working up a grant application is the planning and documenting of the involvement of service users/patients/relevant groups or organisations (Public Patient Involvement or PPI) ie the people most likely to have a vested interest in the research you are intending to do. Indeed, many major national funders, including the NIHR, require detailed evidence of how service users have been involved. But do you know who to approach? When? How? What can service users be involved with? What can they add? Sometimes it’s relatively straightforward to identify appropriate individuals and organisations. Other occasions can call for more creativity. Hot tip: everything takes longer to arrange than you might think. Allow a minimum of 6 weeks to plan, consult service users and feedback from the PPI consultation to your colleagues.

If you’d like some advice about planning PPI and conducting service user consultations for a project Helen Allen (helena@bournemouth.ac.uk) will be pleased to advise you. Helen is available on Tuesday 26th.

Midwifery-led antenatal care models

open access, Publishing, writing

BU academics in CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinal Health) have been working with colleagues across the UK in the so-called McTempo Collaboration on mapping the key characteristics of midwifery-led antenatal care models. This week BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth published our paper that brings this evidence together [1].  The lead author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Symon, is based at the University of Dundee his co-authors are based at the University of Stirling, UCLAN, Queen’s University, Belfast, NHS Education for Scotland and Bournemouth University.  The McTempo (Models of Care: The Effects on Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes) collaboration is a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research grouping established to explore and evaluate differentcare models used in maternity care.

Symon et al 2016 frameworkOur specific aim in this paper was to map the characteristics of antenatal care models tested in Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to a new evidence-based framework for quality maternal and newborn care (QMNC) [2]. This offers the opportunity to identify systematically the characteristics of care delivery that may be generalizable across contexts, thereby enhancing implementation.  The paper concludes: “The QMNC framework facilitates assessment of the characteristics of antenatal care models. It is vital tounderstand all the characteristics of multi-faceted interventions such as care models; not only what is done but why itis done, by whom, and how this differed from the standard care package. By applying the QMNC framework we have established a foundation for future reports of intervention studies so that the characteristics of individual models can be evaluated, and the impact of any differences appraised.”

The paper has been published in an Open Access journal and is, therefore, easily available across the globe.

 

References:

  1. Symon, A., Pringle, J., Cheyne, H., Downe, S., Hundley, V., Lee, E., Lynn, F., McFadden, A., McNeill, J., Renfrew, M., Ross-Davie, M., van Teijlingen, E., Whitford, H, Alderdice, F. (2016) Midwifery-led antenatal care models: Mapping a systematic review to an evidence-based quality framework to identify key components and characteristics of care BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 16: 168 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2393/16/168
  2. Renfrew MJ, McFadden A, Bastos MH, Campbell J, Channon AA, Cheung NF, Audebert Delage Silva DR, Downe S, Kennedy HP, Malata A, et al. (2014) Midwifery and quality care: findings from a new evidence-informed framework for maternal and newborn care. The Lancet, 384(9948): 1129-1145.

IFOMPT 2016

conferences, PG research

ifmopt-2016

I was delighted to present this month at a large international conference, IFOMPT 2016, in Glasgow. The International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Physical Therapists (IFOMPT) is an international body composed of many national groups specialising in post-graduate musculoskeletal physiotherapy. This is the first time the IFOMPT Conference, which is held every four years, has been hosted in the UK since 1988. This conference presented an ideal opportunity to promote the reputation of BU, the new Orthopaedic Research Institute, and AECC (where the research was undertaken).
I gave a poster presentation on work related to my PhD research into the mechanism of spinal manipulation in the treatment of neck pain. I was really pleased that there was a good bit of interest in the poster and I made useful contacts in Japan, China, USA – and Bournemouth! I was able to tempt some people I admire to my poster by posting the picture below on Twitter and sending to the Twitterati I knew were at the conference – social media works (I was not begging for attention, honest).

Come and see my poster!

Come and see my poster!

The other cool bit of technology I used for the first time at this conference was the conference app – no conference abstract booklet to have to carry around in a tacky conference bag for a couple of days.

Is a paper copy of conference proceedings now a thing of the past?

Is a paper copy of conference proceedings now a thing of the past?

The app had everything – the full itinerary, abstracts (including those of the 190 posters), and there were biographies and contact details for all the speakers and most of the delegates too. Networking can be exhausting and intimidating – this enabled me to contact people directly whom I wanted to discuss my research with and contributed to an excellent conference experience.
If you’d like to know more about the conference, or my research into the mechanism of spinal manipulation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. (You can get a copy of my poster by clicking here).

Dr Jonny Branney
Faculty of Health and Social Sciences
jbranney@bournemouth.ac.uk