Researchers: Dr Binu Perera and Dr Ben Bowers
Funders: Wellcome Trust Early Career Award [Ben Bowers]
Partner institutions: University of Cambridge, Engineering Department,
Start date: 01/09/2024
End date: 01/08/2026
Project summary:
Injectable medications are prescribed weeks or months in advance of anticipated need for patients with terminal conditions and stored in the home. These include opioids and sedatives to manage symptoms at the end of life. Critically, despite their frequent use, we do not adequately understand different stakeholders’ needs and priorities regarding this practice.
The proposed study will explore and compare different stakeholders' needs and priorities for community-based systems in prescribing and using injectable medications in the community. We are using a simple and effective engineering design technique called a stakeholder needs assessment, completed via an online survey. 440 members of the public and health and social care practitioners have recently taken part.
Project aims:
-
To identify a wide range of key stakeholders’, their priorities and needs in systems for using injectable end-of-life symptom control medications in the community.
Project impact:
Our novel stakeholder needs analysis methods will reveal the diversity in priorities and needs between stakeholders and within stakeholder groups. We will share these novel methods and our learning from the process to inform the development of the stakeholder needs analysis technique and its application in healthcare research and systems improvement initiatives.
Further information, references, publications and presentations:
Bowers B, Howard P, Madden B, Pollock K, Barclay S. Is end-of-life anticipatory prescribing always enough? British Medical Journal 2023; 381: p1106
Enhancing Anticipatory Prescribing in End of Life Care Research Repository. 2024.