SAPPHIRE’s Natalie Armstrong and Caroline Morris have recently returned from the ‘Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference’ (#PODC2016) in sunny Barcelona, in this blog they reflect on this developing area and what they took away from the event. What is overdiagnosis, and why is it something to be prevented? Broadly speaking, when people talk about […]
The level of doctors’ working hours over weekends in hospitals is a subject of much current debate and controversy, with considerable attention being paid to the ‘weekend effect’ – evidence that patients who are admitted to hospital the weekends are at higher risk of death. The HiSLAC project is an independent study exploring the […]
A bit about me I’ve been a researcher and part-time PhD student at SAPPHIRE at the University of Leicester for nearly four years. My day-to-day work is concerned with exploring how NHS hospitals ensure and improve patient safety – particularly focusing on organisational culture– while my PhD research is concerned with exploring patient safety from […]
Too often debates about ‘best practice’ in healthcare are held in remote forums, inaccessible to the people whose lives they impact because of physical distance, expensive paywalls and subscription policies, or unintelligible jargon. I was therefore delighted to read Abraham Verghese’s 2009 novel Cutting for Stone and find it dealing with issues of medicine, healing, […]
This week’s SAPPHIRE Spotlight profile will focus on the very exciting work of Dr Emmilie (Emma-Louise) Aveling. Emmilie is a Research Fellow in the SAPPHIRE group, who specialises in applied qualitative research in the fields of global health and healthcare quality and safety. Emmilie is currently based at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, […]
Feeding back the results of clinical trials to participants has long been seen as good ethical research practice, and new guidance from the Health Research Authority, the national regulatory body for research in England, makes it clear that feedback is part of researchers’ commitment to participants. But what are the consequences of sharing results […]
Introduction: The challenge of person-centred care Over recent years the push for the NHS to become more person-centred has been mounting, with increasing attention paid both to the importance of patients’ experiences of care and supporting them to manage their own health. This emphasis is made clear in the vision laid out in the NHS […]
I’d like to start with a story about a young Tanzanian boy named Erasto Mpemba. It was 1969, it was very hot, and he was making ice cream. Ice-cream making was an extremely popular pastime and there was fierce competition to be fast to ensure that you would definitely get a spot in the freezer […]
We’re lucky in SAPPHIRE to have lots of incredible researchers doing fascinating work. These SAPPHIRE Spotlight profiles will highlight some of them and their exciting research projects. The series starts with Dr Damian Roland, who is a Consultant at the University of Leicester NHS Trust and Honorary Senior Lecturer in the SAPPHIRE group. Damian’s […]
It’s comforting to have hard facts and figures so that we can feel like we know exactly what went wrong and what went right. When the data in question speak to patient safety, to the need to prevent harm to patients and their families, the urge to find the answers in ‘the facts’ may be […]
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