Survey: LGBT Patients’ Experiences of Primary Care
The LGBT Foundation Patients’ Experiences of Primary Care Annual Survey is now live.
Running until 19 November, the survey asks about people’s experiences of accessing healthcare services from their GP, dentist, pharmacist and optometrist.
Anyone who identifies as LGBT is welcome to take part.
LGBT Patients' Experiences of Primary Care
PRSB launches work to accredit apps and digital health technologies
The PRSB is working on two new accreditation projects to help inform professionals and patients about the safety of health and care apps and decision-making support tools.
Work has begun to develop a new accreditation framework for apps which support people with their own care before they make contact with their doctor, pharmacist or 111.
Throughout November, PRSB will be consulting with a series of webinars and through an online discussion forum to agree what criteria an accredited app should meet.
It will also be working with NHSX to develop and endorse a standard for digital health technologies against which products and apps can be assessed.
Anyone interested in getting involved with the work on accreditation can contact [javascript protected email address].
Raising staff awareness of the NHS App
NHS Digital has developed a resource pack to help communications teams raise staff awareness of the NHS App and be part of the campaign.
The resource includes posters, images for social media, a presentation, web banners and suggested copy for newsletters and bulletins.
It is hoped more NHS staff will start using and promoting the app.
Lay summaries and writing for patients
In this Medical Writing article, the authors examine the trend for increasing and more transparent patient information.
Lisa Chamberlain James and Trishna Bharadia ask how close we have come in the last few years to producing useful and meaningful information for patients.
They also outline the challenges faced by medical writers and the pharmaceutical industry as a whole in trying to comply with recent European requirements for the creation of lay summaries of key regulatory submission documents.
Lay summaries and writing for patients: Where are we now and where are we going?, Medical Writing
Involving clinician-patients in PPI
In this article for the BMJ, Emma Sutton discusses whether patients who are also researchers and clinicians have an important part to play in quality improvement.
She outlines the different perspectives being a patient, physiotherapist and healthcare researcher have given her.
Emma discusses both the potential benefits and challenges of including clinician-patients and researcher-patients in PPI.
The importance of health information on the internet
In this article, Andre Kushniruk reflects on a personal patient journey, where using the internet helped reach a good outcome despite 'organisational limitations and gaps'.
His journey illustrates the importance of human-related factors affecting access to health information.
It also highlights the need for improved access to appropriate health information along the patient journey that can support patient and provider joint decision-making.
Health Literacy 2030: Is it time to redefine?
For decades, health literacy has been used to describe the ability of individuals to locate, interpret, and apply health information to their decisions.
This article argues the term 'health literacy' should not be redefined.
Instead, a new term should be introduced – health information fluency—defined as universal effective use of health information.
Authors argue the old term could still be used to describe concerns about individual skills but a new term would encourage research into creating accurate, accessible health information that people can easily find, understand, and use to inform their decisions.
Journal of General Internal Medicine via Springer Link
Podcast: Innovations in community-centred support
What do we mean by community-centred approaches?
In a new podcast by Think Local Act Personal, Alex Fox, from Shared Lives Plus, and TLAP’s Caroline Speirs, talk about what this means and how we can get better at it. Running time six minutes.
Study: How helpful are PPI strategic documents?
A new framework analysis looks at how helpful Patient and Public Strategic Documents actually are.
The authors argue strategic documents are viewed as an essential feature of organisational commitment to openness and transparency.
However, documents are not always available or written in a way a non-expert can understand.
Proposed actions are not necessarily linked to a defined goal. This makes it difficult for those responsible for turning strategic goals into real action.
Having evaluated 15 strategic documents against five domains the authors ask if there is an alternative approach to constructing PPI strategy.