Log in
Elevated blood glucose levels — the hallmark of diabetes — is estimated by the World Health Organization to be the third leading cause of premature death globally. Around 4 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with diabetes; their treatment accounts for 10% (£10 billion) of NHS expenditure. Self-management strategies and the promotion of a healthy lifestyle are fundamental to the treatment and prevention of type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Since 2008, Leicester's Diabetes Research Centre has developed, evaluated, disseminated and implemented a range of programmes based on a technique called structured education. The flagship DESMOND programme is run in over half of all clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), affecting thousands of people with newly diagnosed T2DM. The Walking Away prevention programme has been widely implemented in the UK, Ireland and Australia. These programmes are the only nationally available evidence-based structured education programmes for the prevention and management of T2DM.
Dr Lloyd's research examines the relationship between diabetes and mental health, particularly in under-served or marginalised communities. Through extensive international collaborations research findings have been disseminated to a wide audience. Locally, service users have been involved in the development of alternative ways of obtaining informed consent, to allow greater research inclusivity. Culturally appropriate tools, for identifying depressive symptoms as well as knowledge deficits in diabetes self-care, have been designed and tested. As a result, a psychotherapy service for people with co-morbid diabetes and psychological problems has been successfully established in a diabetes centre attended by more than 6,000 individuals.
Evidence about the need for and provision of health visiting services generated through research undertaken at King's College London (KCL) has underpinned major changes in national policies for health visiting. Our findings about health visitors' practice, availability and distribution of services and effectiveness in terms of parenting/child outcomes, revealed both shortfalls in provision and opportunities for improvement and led to the development of a new caseload weighting tool and funding model for service planning. The accumulated evidence from this research helped convince the UK Government in 2010 to commit to 4,200 more health visitors by 2015 — a workforce expansion of nearly 50% — in a time of austerity and restraint elsewhere in the public sector.
Research at Northumbria has identified factors associated with trust in and intention to use Internet based health advice. A model of trust in online advice was published in 2007 that showed the importance of personalised peer-to-peer health messages — this was taken up by the press and broadcast media and led to changes in industry and public health practice around (i) the use of web material as a marketing and consumer tool for big pharma; (ii) the design of contemporary e-health sites; (iii) Government policy on the use of personal patient experience to influence patient choice.
A health informatics platform supporting chronic disease management nationally and internationally creating impact upon:
Adults with learning disabilities (LD) often cannot adequately report illness and there is evidence that treatable illnesses go undetected. As a direct result of Cardiff University research on health checking adults in primary care, the Welsh Government and the Department of Health now provide funding for all adults with LDs across England and Wales to receive an annual health check that employs Cardiff University methods. Current data on take-up (N=78,000 per year) and evaluation of results show that nearly 250,000 adults with LDs have had new health needs identified and treatments initiated during the REF assessment period (2008-2013). Nearly 40,000 adults per year will have new health needs identified and treatments initiated as a result of the health checks, with approximately 3,500 of these being potentially serious conditions.
We have achieved significant and far reaching impact in the field of public health outcomes, policy and practice. For the first time, age/sex disaggregated estimates of smoking and ex-smoking prevalence were made available for approximately 7700 electoral wards in England and around 1000 postcode sectors for Scotland. The information has influenced national tobacco control policies (e.g. the ban of smoking in enclosed public spaces in England) and has impacted on national smoking-related health inequalities by targeting delivery of cessation services where they are most needed. Findings have also informed anti-smoking campaigns led by health authorities, charities and pressure groups.
Findings from research at Newcastle on health inequalities and the basis on which economic decisions are made have informed the recommendations made to and adopted by the Secretary of State of Health. These recommendations influenced two specific areas of the National Health Service (NHS) budget allocation. Formulae developed by Wildman and his colleagues are of key importance in determining the allocation of the NHS's £8 billion prescribing budget and the £10.4 billion mental health services budget.
Scotland's Health On the Web (SHOW) was the first Healthcare Information Network of its kind and was developed in an EU project between 1996 and 1999. The original aim was to develop ways of exploiting the Web to provide trustworthy and authoritative health information in a way that was easy to find. The resulting system was adopted as the major vehicle of NHS Scotland for providing healthcare information to public and professionals. Serviced by a specially appointed team, it currently supports around 400 sites, and in recent years usage has been high, averaging around 50 million website hits per month.
Research by the University of Nottingham has played a leading role in developing national, international and industry guidance on practical approaches to tackling the problem of psychosocial risks in the workplace. The European Commission, the World Health Organisation, the Health and Safety Executive, major global corporations and small and medium-sized businesses have supported and adopted the frameworks and recommendations resulting from this work. In the UK alone the guidance is estimated to have contributed to a saving of almost £2bn over 10 years by helping to improve employees' health and so reducing the costs associated with work-related illness.