Publications by authors named "Helen E Seers"
Introduction: Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing is a validated person-centred outcome measure, piloted as a core monitoring tool to understand what matters to people living with frailty in Gloucestershire. This paper describes the acceptability of MYCaW used in this setting, and the development of a framework for analysing personalised concerns from people living with frailty.
Methods: MYCaW was implemented in the Complex Care at Home service and South Cotswold Frailty Service from November 2020 onwards.
Objectives: This study evaluated the change in the concerns, wellbeing, and lifestyle behaviors of informal caregivers of people with cancer attending Penny Brohn UK's Living Well Course (LWC), a self-management education intervention.
Design: A pre-postcourse design collected self-reported quantitative and qualitative data from informal caregivers attending a LWC.
Setting/location: Penny Brohn UK is a United Kingdom-based charity (not-for-profit) providing specialist integrative, whole person support, free of charge, to people affected by cancer.
The term "whole-person cancer care"-an approach that addresses the needs of the person as well as treating the disease-is more widely understood in the United Kingdom than its synonym "integrative oncology." The National Health Service (NHS) provides free access to care for all, which makes it harder to prioritize NHS funding of whole-person medicine, where interventions may be multimodal and lacking in cost-effectiveness data. Despite this, around 30% of cancer patients are known to use some form of complementary or alternative medicine (CAM).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The widespread use of complementary therapies alongside biomedical treatment by people with cancer is not supported by evidence from clinical trials. We aimed to use combined qualitative and quantitative data to describe and measure individualised experiences and outcomes.
Materials And Methods: In three integrative cancer support centres (two breast cancer only) in the UK, consecutive patients completed the individualised outcome questionnaire Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing (MYCaW) before and after treatment.
Goals Of Work: The goal of this study is the determination of key themes to aid the analysis of qualitative data collected at three cancer support centres in England, using the Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing (MYCaW) questionnaire.
Patients And Methods: People with cancer who use complementary therapies experience and value a wide range of treatment effects, yet tools are urgently required to quantitatively measure these outcomes. MYCaW is an individualised questionnaire used in cancer support centres providing complementary therapies, scoring 'concerns or problems' and 'well-being' and collecting qualitative data about other major events in a patient's life and what has been most important to the patient.
Rationale: It has been suggested that caffeine is most likely to benefit mood and performance when alertness is low.
Objectives: To measure the effects of caffeine on psychomotor and cognitive performance, mood, blood pressure and heart rate in sleep-restricted participants. To do this in a group of participants who had also been previously deprived of caffeine for 3 weeks, thereby potentially removing the confounding effects of acute caffeine withdrawal.
Rationale: Many studies have found that caffeine consumed after overnight caffeine abstinence improves cognitive performance and mood. Much less is known, however, about the effects of caffeine after shorter periods of caffeine abstinence.
Objectives: The aim of this study was to measure the effects on psychomotor and cognitive performance, mood, hand steadiness, blood pressure and heart rate of caffeine administration after periods of 4, 6, and 8 h of caffeine abstinence.