Taking charge of chronic lung disease
Just this month, my colleagues and I were award a significant research grant from the Health Research Council of New Zealand to undertake a feasibility study to test a brief self-management intervention for people who have been admitted to hospital for problems with chronic obstructive lung disease. I am undertaking this study with colleagues from the Department of Medicine (Bernadette Jones, Dr Tristram Ingham, and Prof. Mark Weatherall) in collaboration with Dr James Fingleton, a respiratory physician at the Capital & Coast DHB and researcher from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand. Also involved are Amanda McNaughton and Harry McNaughton who are currently living overseas.
The purpose of this study is to test a new intervention designed to help people more actively engage in the management of their own health and wellbeing after hopsitalisation for chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD), and to increase uptake of pulmonary rehabilitation – an existing programme of exercise and education that is known to reduce rehospitalisation rates for people with COPD. Every year in NZ there are over 12,000 hospital admissions for COPD, costing $60 million annually. Many of these are for repeat admission. Our intervention, if successful, could reduce costs of hospitalisation for COPD as well as improve people health and quality of life with the condition. The intervention is cultural responsive and strength-based, focusing on empowering people to take charge of their own health rather than just providing them with inhalers, pills, instruction or information. This research builds on our past work examining uptake of pulmonary rehabilitation in New Zealand, cultural factors influence uptake of pulmonary rehabilitation, and Dr Harry McNaughton past work with Dr Matire Harwood exploring a similar kind of self-management intervention for people with stroke. We aim to begin work on this 2-year study this month.
A feasibility study, incidentally, is one that focuses on gathering information about the methods for a clinical trial to make sure that the clinical trial is a scientifically valid as possible before you begin. Fully powered clinical trials are very expensive! So you don’t want to begin one with question in your mind about whether participants will actually engage with your intervention or whether your assumption about your outcome measurements tool are correct. In this feasibility study we will be testing our study methods, gathering information about clinical outcomes to inform a power calculation for a full clinical trial, and evaluate the acceptability of our intervention and study methods from the perspective of our study participants and their families.
