Primary Care and Health Services
One of Newcastle University’s strengths is in Primary Care and Health Services research, carried out by a relatively small team of 6.8 FTE.
Primary Care and Health Services at Newcastle University
One of Newcastle University’s strengths is in Primary Care and Health Services research, carried out by a relatively small team of 6.8 FTE. Since the last REF, we obtained £9.9M in grant awards, including leading NIHR strategic infrastructure grants for the School of Primary Care Research (£2.3M) and the PRU Older People and Frailty (£5M); and for the Alzheimer’s Society Centre of Excellence (£1.7M) and NIHR Global Health Research Group (£2M). These grants led to 381 NU-authored publications, with a field-weighted citation index of 2.35, nearly half of which were written with international collaborators.
We focus on four main areas:
- multidisciplinary care
- optimising care for older people
- patient care for people with dementia
- changing patient experience
In multidisciplinary care, the main achievements include: 1) collaborating with NHS England and local CCGs to improve care through designing and evaluating local initiatives. For example, interviews with practitioners identified barriers to self-management of COPD, which informed a CCGs’s COPD strategy and introduction of successful multidisciplinary case management. 2) NU was one of only two HEI members of Connected Health Cities, a project which used data and technology to improve health across the North of England. This project improved interactions between patients, family and health and social care professionals at the end of life, demonstrating the importance of good multidisciplinary care.
Secondly, our work into optimising care for older people informed two Government policy documents (the 2016 Future of an Ageing Population report and 2018 Loneliness Strategy) and a 2017 NHS policy initiative on comprehensive care of older people with frailty. This uptake of research into relevant policies is crucial given that the UK population is ageing. In addition, we collaborate with the North East Commissioning Support Unit and CCGs to evaluate new practices in care homes and implementation of early warning scores.
Our research into patient care for people with dementia has informed not only UK programmes, in the form of national NICE guidance, but also international police and practice such the WHO Global Action Plan on Dementia. As well as informing policy, we operate an award-winning Massive Online Open Course on Dementia Care to support family carers. The course, which was developed with family carers of people with dementia and health and social care professionals, has 35,000 users with global reach into 170 countries.
Finally, we understand the importance of improving patient experience. As an example, we worked closely with young people with long-term conditions such as diabetes about their transition from child- to adult-centred services, as well as commissioners of these services. We identified key factors that led successful transition, and these directly underpinned high-level policy such as the NHS Long Term Plan and NICE guidance. Recognising the need to aid adoption of this policy into practice, we created a free online Toolkit to assist implementation.