current and developing theme is understanding and influencing medicines use behaviour at patient-prescriber and policy level.
There are specific research themes and related projects:
Mapping the Epidemiology & Self-Management of Minor Ailments
Patients experience of symptoms can influence their use of health care, both in consultations with health care professionals and how they use medicines.
There are three areas of investigation:
Top
The Role of the Internet as a Source of Health & Medicines Information
The use of the internet by menopausal women and adolescents and pre-school children has been explored within UK and USA. We have recently completed research on young people's use of weight loss and weight gain products and the quality of internet web sites promoting these products has been explored.
Key Publications
Gray, NJ; Noyce, PR; Klein, JD; Sesselberg, TS; Cantrill, JA (2005). Health information seeking in adolescence: The place of the Internet. Social Science and Medicine 60(7): 1467-78
Reed M, Anderson C; (2002) Evaluation of patient information internet web sites about menopause and hormone replacement therapy. Maturitas 43, 135-154.
Luevorasirikul, K; Gray, NJ; Anderson, CW (2008). Developing a consumer evaluation tool of weight control strategy advertisements on the Internet. Health Education Research ; 23: 567-75.
Top
Use of medicines in depression
The overall aim of the research is to improve patient and health professional understanding of what it is like to use medicines for treating depression. The research will benefit from, and build on, two existing projects on experiences of depression conducted by the DIPEx health experiences research group in the University of Oxford. These interview studies are of depression in adults and depression
in young people aged 16-25 years of age. We are performing a re-analysis of medicines issues from the two existing interview collections on depression and depression in young people, see HealthTalkOnline and articles by the YouthHealthTalk. These data have already been coded into broad codes on experiences of medicines and side effects, decisions about treatments etc. and will be examined to identify topics for more detailed and focussed exploration in this study.
Top