Project Wrap Up
What is the effect on weight by regularly weighing 20-70 year old attendees in general practice?
Dr Duncan Mackinnon, a GP from Bega, has been conducting a study to assess whether the weighing of patients at every consultation (over an eight-month period), followed by usual care, has an impact on healthy weight maintenance of 20-70 year old general practice attendees. The pilot study has involved 285 patients from six practices and will be winding up in November this year (Congratulations Duncan!).
What’s happening next?
Data Analysis
Following the intervention study the mean weight gain of the intervention sample will then be compared with the average population weight gain to determine if the intervention had an effect on intervention patients’ weight maintenance.
Evaluation of the Study
An evaluation of the study will also be conducted and aims to interviews key participants including the patients, GP’s, reception staff and practice managers to at exploring their experiences of the weight management study.
We are looking forward to the next stages of the project and wish to thank all the practices who have been involved in this study. We would also welcome those practices to let us know if they would like to be involved in further analysis of the study. Please contact ISPRN on, email: isprn-enquiries@uow.edu.au OR phone: (02) 42215958.
Project Update- Electronic Medical Data Interest Group
What is the EMD?
The EMD is a group of practitioners interested in the use of Electronic Data from medical records for research and practice improvement.
What are we doing?
Up until recently, the group has been focussing on looking at the how what and why of data collection, particularly in relation to answering some practical questions. The first of these is “What happens if we stop statins in the over 75 age group”? This project has now become the starting point of a Masters research project for Dr Adam Hodgkins- well done and good luck!
A big thank you for the effort so far from Prof Andrew Bonney, Dean Denman from Best Practice, Darren Mayne from NSW Health Dr Jeff Pinkstone and Dr Lucie Stanford.
Future Directions
The main focus of the group now is engaging a group of interested practices to build a network of eGP data. Involved practices will help to focus the direction. Options include doing local data searches to help reflect on clinical practice for a single GP or single practice, through to developing tools to aggregate this data to form a bigger dataset for answering clinical questions of interest of practitioners.
I will be visiting the UK in September for a conference and will be meeting with the UK Big Data group to see if we can apply any of their experience in our local area.
Getting Involved
If you’d like to know more, get involved and start maximising the value of the data in your practices and particularly if you have questions that you think could be answered by this approach over time, please contact Alyssa Munkman isprn-enquiries@uow.edu.au.
Dr Stephen Barnett