Publications by authors named "McPhail S"

Background: Patient and clinician expectations of benefit from recommended management approaches may potentially impact the success of managing musculoskeletal conditions.

Methods: This was a multisite study in an advanced practice musculoskeletal service across Queensland, Australia. Relationships between patient and clinician (advanced physiotherapy practitioner) expectations of benefit, patient characteristics, and clinical outcome recorded 6 months later were explored with regression analysis in 619 patients undergoing non-surgical multidisciplinary care for either knee osteoarthritis (n = 286), low back pain (n = 249) or shoulder impingement syndrome (n = 84).

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Background: Access to clinical trials is limited for rural, regional and remote Australians, adding to the current health inequity between rural and metropolitan populations. The Australasian Teletrial Model was developed to bring clinical trials "closer to home". In 2020, the Australian Teletrial Program was funded to expand and support the uptake of the model across six Australian states and territories.

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Background: Acute application of adjunctive negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) significantly improves time to re-epithelialization in pediatric burn patients. This adjunctive treatment has not yet been broadly or routinely adopted as a standard primary burns dressing strategy. The Implementation of Negative PRessurE for acute Pediatric burns (INPREP) trial will implement and evaluate the impact of adjunctive NPWT in parallel with co-designed implementation strategies and resources across four major pediatric hospitals.

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Background: International consensus exists for neurodevelopmental follow-up care of children with congenital heart disease (CHD) to support timely intervention for developmental delays. Yet, documentation of how this care is implemented in Australia is lacking. This study aimed to identify, categorise, and understand care pathways and services supporting neurodevelopmental follow-up of Australian children with CHD.

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  • The study evaluates the effectiveness, safety, and influencing factors of ablative fractional carbon dioxide laser (AFCO2L) treatment for hypertrophic burn scars among adult patients at an Australian burn unit.
  • 47 patients participated, receiving up to four treatments over a year, with outcomes measured through ultrasound scar thickness and patient surveys at various intervals.
  • Results showed significant improvements in scar thickness and assessment scores after treatment, with minimal complications, indicating AFCO2L is a safe and effective option for managing burn scars.
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Background: Effective fall prevention interventions in hospitals require appropriate allocation of resources early in admission. To address this, fall risk prediction tools and models have been developed with the aim to provide fall prevention strategies to patients at high risk. However, fall risk assessment tools have typically been inaccurate for prediction, ineffective in prevention, and time-consuming to complete.

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Background: Electronic standard order sets automate the ordering of specific treatment, testing, and investigative protocols by physicians. These tools may help reduce unwarranted clinical variation and improve health care efficiency. Despite their routine implementation within electronic medical records (EMRs), little is understood about how they are used and what factors influence their adoption in practice.

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Introduction: Use of investigations can help support the diagnostic process of patients with cancer in primary care, but the size of variation between patient group and between practices is unclear.

Methods: We analysed data on 53 252 patients from 1868 general practices included in the National Cancer Diagnosis Audit 2018 using a sequence of logistic regression models to quantify and explain practice-level variation in investigation use, accounting for patient-level case-mix and practice characteristics. Four types of investigations were considered: any investigation, blood tests, imaging and endoscopy.

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Background: Computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) enhance patient care through real-time, evidence-based guidance for health care professionals. Despite this, the effective implementation of these systems for health services presents multifaceted challenges, leading to inappropriate use and abandonment over the course of time. Using the Non-Adoption, Abandonment, Scale-Up, Spread, and Sustainability (NASSS) framework, this qualitative study examined CDSS adoption in a metropolitan health service, identifying determinants across implementation stages to optimize CDSS integration into health care practice.

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  • Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) testing is utilized in primary care to identify prostate cancer, and this study focuses on how many cases are diagnosed through asymptomatic PSA screenings.
  • An analysis of data from the 2018 English National Cancer Diagnosis Audit revealed that 19% of prostate cancer cases were detected via asymptomatic PSA testing, with a significant portion (52.1%) being patients aged 50-69 years.
  • Factors such as younger age, non-White ethnicity, lower deprivation, and fewer co-morbidities were linked to a higher likelihood of asymptomatic PSA diagnoses, highlighting considerable variability among different GP practices.
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  • Cancer research is hindered by the need for high-quality, resource-intensive data, and this study compares on-site diagnostic cancer data collected during the SYMPLIFY study with existing cancer registry data from England and Wales to evaluate its validity and timeliness.
  • Data from over 5,400 participants was analyzed, focusing on the relevance and timeliness of cancer diagnoses made within nine months of enrollment, covering various classifications including ICD-10 codes, morphology, stage, and TNM classification.
  • Findings revealed high levels of data completeness (84%-100% for morphology), but lower completeness for overall stage (43%-100%) and TNM stage (74%-83%), with a notable concordance rate
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  • The study identifies that implementation costs of health innovations are often overlooked in economic evaluations, impacting resource allocation in healthcare.
  • Through interviews with experts in implementation science, health economics, and digital health, the research highlights challenges in identifying, collecting, and valuing these costs, with significant variation in methods used.
  • Participants acknowledged the importance of implementation costs but faced difficulties due to unclear definitions and burdensome data collection processes, emphasizing the need for better collaboration and consistency in terminology.
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Objectives: Microwave ablation (MWA) has gained attention as a minimally invasive and safe alternative to surgical intervention for patients with small renal masses; however, its cost-effectiveness in Australia remains unclear. This study conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis to evaluate the relative clinical and economic merits of MWA compared to robotic-assisted partial nephrectomy (RA-PN) in the treatment of small renal masses.

Methods: A Markov state-transition model was constructed to simulate the progression of Australian patients with small renal masses treated with MWA versus RA-PN over a 10-year horizon.

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Background: Approximately one-third of adults over the age of 65 experience falls annually, with half resulting in injury. Peak bodies have recommended the use of fall-risk screening tools in the emergency department (ED) to identify patients requiring in-depth assessment and potential fall-prevention intervention. This study aimed to examine the scope of published studies on fall-risk screening tools used in the ED and evidence of associations between screening and future falls.

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Background: Although clinical guidelines endorse screening for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) with advanced fibrosis in people with type 2 diabetes (T2D), the feasibility of and barriers and considerations relevant to implementing this approach in the community remain unclear.

Methods: Sequential adults with T2D attending selected community clinics during 2021-2023 were invited to receive a "liver health check" (n=543). A further 95 participants were referred directly from their general practitioner (GP) or self-referred to the study.

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Background: A dramatic decline in mental health of people worldwide in the early COVID-19 pandemic years has not recovered. In rural and remote Australia, access to appropriate and timely mental health services has been identified as a major barrier to people seeking help for mental ill-health. From 2020 to 2021 a care navigation model, Navicare, was co-designed with rural and remote communities in the Greater Whitsunday Region of Central Queensland in Australia.

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Background: Successful deployment of clinical prediction models for clinical deterioration relates not only to predictive performance but to integration into the decision making process. Models may demonstrate good discrimination and calibration, but fail to match the needs of practising acute care clinicians who receive, interpret, and act upon model outputs or alerts. We sought to understand how prediction models for clinical deterioration, also known as early warning scores (EWS), influence the decision-making of clinicians who regularly use them and elicit their perspectives on model design to guide future deterioration model development and implementation.

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Introduction: Identifying and addressing neurodevelopmental delays in children can be challenging for families and the healthcare system. Delays in accessing services and early interventions are common. The design and delivery of these services, and associated outcomes for children, may be improved if service provision aligns with families' needs and preferences for receiving care.

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  • About 19% of cancer patients are diagnosed after using emergency care, with varying pathways (Type-A: referrals and Type-B: admissions).
  • Factors like co-morbidity, advanced cancer stage, and socio-economic status contribute to higher emergency diagnosis risk.
  • Combining both emergency pathways (Type-A+B) shows stronger links to higher short-term mortality, highlighting the need for better diagnostic protocols.
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  • * This contributes to the hospital crisis, causing issues like overcrowded emergency departments and reduced capacity for elective surgeries.
  • * The authors suggest improving care by focusing on detailed goal discussions and shared decision-making about treatment, which could better empower patients and improve healthcare outcomes.
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We report 1- and 5-year survival after acute myeloid leukemia (AML) diagnosis and early mortality within 30 days of systemic anticancer therapy (SACT) treatments, using national cancer registry data in England. Patients aged 18 to 99 years diagnosed between 2013 and 2020 were included. Overall survival (OS) was calculated using Kaplan-Meier methodology, and adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs; adjusted for intensity of treatment, age at diagnosis, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic deprivation, comorbidity, and year of diagnosis) using Cox proportional hazards regression.

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Background: Binary classification models are frequently used to predict clinical deterioration, however they ignore information on the timing of events. An alternative is to apply time-to-event models, augmenting clinical workflows by ranking patients by predicted risks. This study examines how and why time-to-event modelling of vital signs data can help prioritise deterioration assessments using lift curves, and develops a prediction model to stratify acute care inpatients by risk of clinical deterioration.

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  • Oesophagogastric cancer surgery outcomes are generally poor, leading researchers to investigate the effectiveness of cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) in predicting postoperative results, especially after neoadjuvant treatments.
  • A study included 611 patients from seven UK centers, analyzing the relationship between peak oxygen uptake (VO peak) and one-year survival, finding no significant correlation, but noting that anaerobic threshold measures related to ideal body weight were predictive of three-year survival.
  • Key factors influencing survival included tumor characteristics and major complications, with specific CPET metrics showing some predictive value but not universally across the entire cohort.
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Background: The fast-track cancer pathway aims to expedite diagnosis of lung cancer and treatment and is the preferred route to diagnosis. Diagnosis following an unplanned admission (unplanned route) has been associated with poor outcomes.

Objective: This study explores factors associated with lung cancer diagnosis following unplanned admissions, focusing on the elderly population.

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