Do you have more than one chronic condition? Do you want to help make sure research is more relevant to people like you?
Chris McParland is a nurse and PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, supervised by Professor Bridget Johnston and Dr Mark Cooper. Their research is seeking to understand how people with multiple chronic conditions experience what we call ‘treatment burden’.
Treatment burden can be described as ‘the work people are expected to do to manage their health’. Examples of this include taking lots of medications, going to lots of healthcare appointments, avoiding certain activities or maintaining a special diet. People with multiple chronic conditions experience a great deal of treatment burden. It can make people feel unsatisfied with their care, or even cause them to stop doing certain health-related tasks.
They are looking for people with multiple chronic conditions to help them develop their research materials. This is different to taking part in research as a participant. They would like people with a lived experience of having multiple chronic conditions to review the documentation they will be sharing with people during their next research study. This is important to make sure that it is relevant, appropriately worded, and understandable. They also welcome any other comments you may have on the way they plan to conduct the study.
Some of their documentation is designed for people with multiple chronic conditions, others for people who care for individuals with multiple chronic conditions. They also think it is important to include people with difficulty understanding some of these documents (due to conditions like stroke or dementia).
This should only take a couple of hours and you can do it in your own time. They will provide a £20 Amazon voucher as a token of their thanks. If you think you would be able to review some of these documents over the next few weeks or would like more information, you can get in touch by emailing c.mcparland.1@research.gla.ac.uk
