Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe mental health problem linked to substantial personal and social costs. Many individuals living with bipolar disorder are parents. Due to the nature of the condition, parents with BD often experience challenges in delivering consistent parenting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In the UK, there are approximately 3500 individuals detained in medium secure service. Service users in such settings have complex and severe mental illness (SMI), often with co-morbid physical health problems, shorter life expectancy and low levels of physical activity (PA). However, there are few studies about PA interventions for medium secure service users in the United Kingdom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Psychiatry
July 2025
Background: Research has demonstrated the ability to identify and treat individuals at high risk of developing psychosis. It is possible to use a similar strategy to identify people who have an emergent risk of bipolar disorder (BD). Interventions during the early phase may improve outcomes and reduce risk of transition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMJ Open
June 2025
Introduction: Thousands of patients with mental illness are admitted to acute adult mental health wards every year in England, where local guidance recommends that all mental health settings be entirely smokefree. Mental health Trusts presently invest substantial effort and resources to implement smoke-free policies and to deliver tobacco dependence treatment to patients. Providing adequate support can help those who smoke remain abstinent or quit smoking during their smoke-free inpatient stay and beyond.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is two to three times more common in people with severe mental illness (SMI) than in the general population. Supporting self-management in diabetes is fundamental to improving clinical outcomes. The DIAMONDS trial aims to evaluate the clinical and cost effectiveness of a novel, codesigned, supported diabetes self-management programme for people with T2DM and SMI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPilot Feasibility Stud
February 2025
Background: Atrial fibrillation is a common cardiac arrhythmia, associated with debilitating symptoms and a decrease in health-related quality of life. Current treatments for atrial fibrillation may not provide symptomatic relief and are associated with risks and adverse responses. Large-scale trials are justified to investigate whether complementary therapies may improve symptoms and/or health-related quality of life in atrial fibrillation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Autistic children can experience mental health, social and emotional difficulties. Carol Gray's Social Stories™ are a highly personalised intervention that provide social information in a short individually tailored story.
Methods: A multi-site pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial to evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of Social Stories™ alongside care as usual in autistic children aged 4-11 years.
Background/objectives: Over 60,000 patients in the United Kingdom are estimated to have artificial eyes. Manufacturing and hand-painting of artificial eyes have not changed significantly since 1948. Delays and colour-matching issues may severely impact a patient's rehabilitation pathway.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: One in 57 children are diagnosed with autism in the UK, and the estimated cost for supporting these children in education is substantial. Social Stories™ is a promising and widely used intervention for supporting children with autism in schools and families. It is believed that Social Stories™ can provide meaningful social information to children that can improve social understanding and may reduce anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Artificial eye users (AEUs) can experience a negative impact on psychological and emotional wellbeing, including reduced social functioning, which may be a consequence of living with one eye removed, and/or of having a prosthetic eye. This may have wider consequences for their families. We aimed to explore what it means to live with a prosthetic eye, for both AEUs and their families-and how any quality of life (QoL) issues impact on their day-to-day functioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Public Health Manag Pract
November 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic vaccination infrastructure was redeployed to address the Mpox epidemic. The Westchester County Department of Health coordinated an effective vaccine distribution, tracking, and data collection process with community partners with real-time feedback of operational challenges and updated public health directives. Westchester County, which comprises 9% of the New York State population, administered 24% (6770 doses) of JYNNEOS (smallpox and monkeypox vaccine) across the state.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: When performing nail surgery, clinicians must choose from a multitude of procedures and variations within each procedure. Much has been published to guide this decision making, but there are a lack of up to date robust systematic reviews to assess the totality of this evidence.
Methods: Five databases (MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science and CENTRAL) and two registers (Clinicaltrials.
Background: Ingrown toenails are a common nail pathology. When conservative treatments are ineffective, a surgical approach is often utilised. Despite recent narrative reviews, there is a need for an up-to-date and rigorous systematic review of surgical methods for treating ingrown toenails.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPilot Feasibility Stud
May 2023
Objective: To determine the acceptability and feasibility of delivering early outpatient review following cardiac surgery and early cardiac rehabilitation (CR), compared to standard practice to establish if a future large-scale trial is achievable.
Methods: A randomised controlled, feasibility trial with embedded health economic evaluation and qualitative interviews, recruited patients aged 18-80 years from two UK cardiac centres who had undergone elective or urgent cardiac surgery via a median sternotomy. Eligible, consenting participants were randomised 1:1 by a remote, centralised randomisation service to postoperative outpatient review 6 weeks after hospital discharge, followed by CR commencement from 8 weeks (control), or postoperative outpatient review 3 weeks after hospital discharge, followed by commencement of CR from 4 weeks (intervention).
Background: Older patients with lower limb amputation, categorised as having "limited community mobility", are under-researched. Understanding their experience with a new prosthetic ankle-foot is important when designing clinical trials. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the adjustments they made after amputation and the acceptability of a self-aligning ankle-foot (SA-AF) to older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground/objective: Around 11,500 artificial eyes are required yearly for new and existing patients. Artificial eyes have been manufactured and hand-painted at the National Artificial Eye Service (NAES) since 1948, in conjunction with approximately 30 local artificial eye services throughout the country. With the current scale of demand, services are under significant pressure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMJ
October 2022
Objective: To examine effectiveness, cost effectiveness, generalisability, and acceptability of financial incentives for smoking cessation during pregnancy in addition to variously organised UK stop smoking services.
Design: Pragmatic, multicentre, single blinded, phase 3, randomised controlled trial (Cessation in Pregnancy Incentives Trial phase 3 (CPIT III)).
Setting: Seven UK stop smoking services provided in primary and secondary care facilities in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England.
Aims: To test the efficacy of 'MiQuit', a tailored, self-help, text message stop smoking programme for pregnancy, as an adjunct to usual care (UC) for smoking cessation in pregnancy.
Design: Multicentre, open, two-arm, parallel-group, superiority randomised controlled trial (RCT) and a trial sequential analysis (TSA) meta-analysis combining trial findings with two previous ones.
Setting: Twenty-four English hospital antenatal clinics.
Objective: To establish the acceptability and feasibility of delivering the Active Communication Education (ACE) programme to increase quality of life through improving communication and hearing aid use in the UK National Health Service.
Design: Randomised controlled, open feasibility trial with embedded economic and process evaluations.
Setting: Audiology departments in two hospitals in two UK cities.
Objectives: To determine the feasibility of conducting a full-scale randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a self-aligning prosthetic ankle-foot compared with a standard prosthetic ankle-foot.
Design: Multicentre parallel group feasibility RCT.
Setting: Five prosthetics centres in England recruiting from July 2018 to August 2019.
: The CHAMP-1 ( Community pharmacy: Highlighting Alcohol use in Medication a Ppointments) pilot trial aimed to explore an intervention discussing alcohol during medication consultations with community pharmacists. It presented various challenges regarding patient retention, as participants were recruited by their pharmacist and followed-up remotely by a trained researcher, who they had not met, two months later. We discuss our actions and experiences of completing follow-up activities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Public Health
November 2020
Background: People with serious mental illness (SMI) have sexual health needs but there is little evidence to inform effective interventions to address them. In fact, there are few studies that have addressed this topic for people with SMI outside USA and Brazil. Therefore, the aim of the study was to establish the acceptability and feasibility of a trial of a sexual health promotion intervention for people with SMI in the UK.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Alcohol interventions are important to the developing public health role of community pharmacies. The Medicines and Alcohol Consultation (MAC) is a new intervention, co-produced with community pharmacists (CPs) and patients, which involves a CP practice development programme designed to integrate discussion of alcohol within existing NHS medicine review services. We conducted a pilot trial of the MAC and its delivery to investigate all study procedures to inform progression to a definitive trial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Eighty per cent of UK women have at least one baby, making pregnancy an opportunity to help women stop smoking before their health is irreparably compromised. Smoking cessation during pregnancy helps protect infants from miscarriage, still birth, low birth weight, asthma, attention deficit disorder and adult cardiovascular disease. UK national guidelines highlight lack of evidence for effectiveness of financial incentives to help pregnant smokers quit.
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