Hepatitis C – How many cases are out there?

Ryan Buchanan is a specialist registrar doctor in liver disease and a PhD student supported by CLAHRC Wessex.

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In my previous blog I described how a novel, award winning case-finding initiative was identifying some of the estimated 200 missing cases of Hepatitis C on the Isle of Wight and linking them directly to specialist care. The second part of this project, which I describe here, is an attempt to establish a more accurate estimation of the true number of missing cases in order to guide future service design and inform best practice elsewhere.

Involving patients and the public in research: Reflecting back and looking ahead

By Claire Ballinger and Mark Stafford-Watson – Chairs, Wessex Inclusion in Service Design and Delivery (WISeRD) group

It’s the end of our first year in CLAHRC Wessex, we have been thinking about our progress in involving patients and the public in our work (or PPI as it’s called), and reviewing where our focus should be for the coming year.  We have settled on five strategic aims:

• Develop our capacity for patient and public involvement (PPI) in research and implementation programmes
• Promote our CLAHRC Wessex activities to the wider public (public engagement)
• Evolve and measure ways to include patients and the public to identify research priorities
• Develop a group of patient and public researchers
• Measure the impact of patient and public involvement within CLAHRC Wessex

The GENIE is out of the bottle – but who controls it? – Dr Anne Kennedy, Principal Research Fellow, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southampton

Here at the CLAHRC Wessex we have been using and developing an interactive tool called GENIE . This is designed to engage and link people with long-term health conditions to social activities and support they value and find useful.

We have been working on the Isle of Wight with the My Life a Full Life team and other organisations to see how we can integrate GENIE as part of day-to-day support for people. Last week we had our first meeting, after months of using the system there to work towards making GENIE ‘Business as Usual’.