Globally, the enablement of self-care is increasingly being recognised as an essential component of chronic disease management. Within the UK a key self-care policy initiative is the Expert Patients Program. Developed from the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program, this is a 6 week self-management education program for people with different chronic diseases, facilitated by lay volunteers. As ...

In June 2010, 25 representatives from Europe and the US met in Washington, DC, USA, to discuss clinical outcome measures in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in the context of clinical trial design and analysis. The workshop was organized in response to a September 2009 European Medicines Agency meeting where a clear directive was given that an international consensus needs to be developed that...

In the design of a randomized clinical trial with one pre and multiple post randomized assessments of the outcome variable, one needs to account for the repeated measures in determining the appropriate sample size. Unfortunately, one seldom has a good estimate of the variance of the outcome measure, let alone the correlations among the measurements over time. We show how sample sizes can be cal...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to estimate lowest possible treatment costs for four novel cancer drugs, hypothesising that generic manufacturing could significantly reduce treatment costs. SETTING This research was carried out in a non-clinical research setting using secondary data. PARTICIPANTS There were no human participants in the study. Four drugs were selected for the study: bor...

BACKGROUND A substantial number of valid outcome measures have been developed to measure health in adult musculoskeletal and childhood disability. Regrettably, national initiatives have merely resulted in changes in attitude, while utilization remains unacceptably low. This study will compare the effectiveness and mediators of two different knowledge transfer (KT) interventions in terms of thei...

The growing older adult population and its higher incidence of diabetes are creating demands on health care providers to address the special needs of these patients. Because nutrition is essential to the proper treatment and self-management of diabetes, clinicians must develop and adopt various strategies to address some of the common nutritional, lifestyle, and self-management barriers that ol...

Editorial Nationwide quality improvement—how are we doing and what can we do? Quality improvement frameworks and methods have developed over the last 100 years. Ernest Codman developed his End Result System at the beginning of last century, suggesting that all patients should have their outcomes evaluated at discharge and one year after [1]. In the 1920s, Flexner evolved his Hospital Standardiz...

The executive function (EF) deficits of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) hinder their performance of complex daily functions. Despite the existing evidence-based pharmacological interventions for ADHD symptoms, no intervention has yet been found that deals directly with EFs in daily tasks. Fourteen children and their parents participated in the Cognitive-Functional ...

Methods An appraisal framework, based on relevant items from existing tools (i.e. COSMIN, FDA, EMPRO, SAC) was developed. Initial testing was conducted as part of a systematic review, in which data were extracted from 100 papers describing parental feeding practices measures (HomeSTEAD). Next, the framework was expanded to include a scoring system for items related to conceptual framework, reli...

BACKGROUND Particularly in groups of adolescents with lower educational level the smoking prevalence is still high and constitutes a serious public health problem. There is limited evidence of effective smoking cessation interventions in this group. Individualised text messaging (SMS) based interventions are promising to support smoking cessation and could be provided to adolescents irrespectiv...