Background: Chronic illnesses (CIs) are increasingly prevalent among children/young people (CYP) globally. For migrant CYP with CIs, achieving a stable life in a new country can be particularly challenging due to additional barriers such as cultural and language differences, unsafe living conditions, and discrimination. While migration can sometimes improve healthcare access by introducing new models of care and ways of understanding health, these advantages are often outweighed by obstacles that hinder access to essential services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Gender identity services for children and young people are currently being reorganised in England and Wales. Provision is required to negotiate clinical uncertainty and a public debate that cannot agree on what care should look like.
Objectives: To explore how young people, parents and young adults respond to gender dysphoria, distress or discomfort; and to understand how they negotiate referral, assessment and possible interventions.
Current discussions about gender identity are increasingly politicised, particularly in the UK. An individual's body becomes a site of competing interests that attempt to regulate the physical, social and moral boundaries between biological sex and a socially realised gender. Care becomes defined within this context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCare, while having no clear boundaries, facilitates a nurturing that requires a disposition to act in another's interests. Care, however, is never disinterested and dividing practices vie with transformative potential, to define what is regarded as appropriate support. Current healthcare for young people who question their gender identity reflect this tension, particularly in the UK, where ideological inscriptions can subvert caring intent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Finland, we report on the trial of a teleoperated care robot named Välkky introduced onto a fully operational hospital neurological ward. Our data revealed a narrative arc where participants' early expectations of the hospital-based trial altered as the project unfolded. Greeted with techno-excitement and experimental enthusiasm about the place of robotics in reshaping roles within clinical care, Välkky became the focus for collaborative in situ learning, adaptation and redesign amongst the roboticists, designers, nurses, patients, and managers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In Ghana, nearly one in four (25%) of the population are sickle cell disease carriers. Furthermore, 2% of all babies born (20 for every 1000 live births) has sickle cell disease. However, little is known about how parents negotiate the financial challenges facing parents of a child with sickle cell disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Humanit
February 2025
Chronic diseases are among the leading causes of mortality in the world, the subject of major regional and international efforts to tackle shared risk factors, implement prevention and control measures and set national targets as part of the drive towards universal health coverage. Yet there is a growing conviction that chronic diseases suffer an image problem. It has been suggested that the terminology 'dulls the senses' to the problems, and in an age where the mass media affords unprecedented opportunities to inform and persuade people to care about their health and that of others, chronic disease representation remains a contested and much debated issue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Improvements in chronic myeloid leukaemia treatment mean it is now relevant to examine the experiences of living with this cancer over a lifetime. This qualitative study aimed to investigate the impact of chronic myeloid leukaemia, from patient and healthcare practitioner perspectives.
Methods: The research was set within the UK's Haematological Malignancy Research Network; a population-based cohort of patients newly diagnosed with blood cancer, treated at one of fourteen hospitals.
Aims: Childhood trauma has been associated with adult psychosocial outcomes linked to social exclusion. However, the strength of these associations in the general population is unknown. The emergence of the UK Biobank, with rich phenotypic characterization of the adult population, affords the exploration of the childhood determinants of adult psychopathology with greater statistical power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvolving knowledge of genetics and improved clinical care have re-shaped life choices for those suffering from chronic, incurable conditions and their families. Yet the realisation of care requires complex navigation to access vital therapies which is often difficult for individuals or their family carers. In the article, we explore the struggles and strategies of parents of children with thalassemia (a genetically inherited blood disorder) in a North Indian city, who have come together to ensure better long-term health of their children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Increasing numbers of interventions are being developed to support self-management for children and young people (CYP) with sickle cell disease (SCD), but no systematic review has systematically synthesized this evidence regarding their characteristics, effectiveness, acceptability and feasibility for all published intervention types.
Methods: The Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines for mixed-method reviews were followed. A systematic search of eight databases and key journals was conducted from their inception to November 2021.
Sickle cell disease is a global health concern. In the UK and USA, where the condition is common, prenatal testing is a routine aspect of antenatal care and offered on the basis of informed reproductive choice. Notwithstanding considerable advances in testing technologies, prenatal diagnosis for sickle cell disease is not common in Africa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The number of children with a life-limiting condition is increasing. The mothers of these children commonly provide extensive care at home for their child and are at a higher risk of poor health than other mothers. The impact of this is rarely explored from mothers' perspectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: NHS England has introduced a new structured medication review (SMR) service within primary care networks (PCNs) forming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy drivers are addressing problematic polypharmacy, reducing avoidable hospitalisations, and delivering better value from medicines spending. This study explores early implementation of the SMR from the perspective of the primary care clinical pharmacist workforce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn order to effectively evaluate complex interventions, there have been calls for the further integration of qualitative methods. Qualitative process studies of brief alcohol interventions and medicines reviews are notably lacking. This article provides a grounded example through the presentation of findings from an embedded qualitative process evaluation of a multi-site, pilot cluster RCT of a new intervention: the Medicines and Alcohol Consultation (MAC).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Alcohol is challenging to discuss, and patients may be reluctant to disclose drinking partly because of concern about being judged. This report presents an overview of the development of a medications review intervention co-produced with the pharmacy profession and with patients, which breaks new ground by seeking to give appropriate attention to alcohol within these consultations.
Methods: This intervention was developed in a series of stages and refined through conceptual discussion, literature review, observational and interview studies, and consultations with advisory groups.
The link between workers with sickle cell disorder (SCD) and employment has until now been seen through the lens of the person's disease, not their relationship to work (paid and unpaid). Using SCD as a case study, we foreground relations of employment, setting sickle cell and work into ecological context. In 2018, two focus group discussions and 47 depth-interviews were conducted with black disabled workers living with SCD across England.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommunity pharmacy faces ongoing challenges to its economic and social standing. A concern to legitimate professional status explains the attraction of public health. Interventions currently advocated by UK State-sponsored health care seek to reconcile the autonomous 'entrepreneurial' patient with market-driven solutions.
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 PDFChronic pain presents a huge burden for individuals and society and evidence suggests intrinsic links with loneliness, social exclusion and sleep. Research examining how these factors interact is warranted. We aimed to explore the relationships between social exclusion, loneliness, acute and chronic pain, and the influence of poor sleep, in the general UK population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aims: It is widely acknowledged that the incidence of inflammatory bowel disease [IBD] is rising within South Asian populations, yet research into the experiences of this group of patients is rare. In this study the lived experiences of UK South Asian adults with IBD, including support from gastroenterology services, was investigated.
Methods: A sample of 33 patients representing the diversity of the UK South Asian population were recruited through five gastroenterology clinics in England.
Introduction: Reducing treatment intensity for pediatric low risk febrile neutropenia may improve quality of life, and reduce hospital-acquired infections and costs. Key stakeholders' attitudes toward early discharge regimens are unknown. This study explored perceptions of reduced therapy regimens in the United Kingdom.
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