August 2017 update
Dr Helen Pryce from Aston University has completed her project on Shared Decision Making in tinnitus care. She has developed an Option Grid specifically to help tinnitus patients and clinicians decide the best form of treatments so that patients are more closely involved in their health care management. We are looking forward to hearing about Helen’s work at our conference.
April 2017 update
Dr Helen Pryce and her team at Aston University are researching what decisional and information needs people have when they seek help with tinnitus. Helen describes how the work is progressing so far.
“We have been completing in depth interviews with 41 people with tinnitus in different regions of England. This is the largest qualitative study in tinnitus to date and provides a great way to model the preferences held by people with tinnitus for their care. Since starting a year ago, we have been able to describe and model the preferences that people with tinnitus have for both the outcome of treatments and also for the ways treatments are delivered. We have written an article outlining this which is in submission with a journal at present. We are hoping to present our findings on this at upcoming conferences in the UK and abroad.”
“We are continuing to recruit participants for the ethnographic strand of our work which involves videoing encounters with clinicians and describing how decisions are made at present.This work enables us to identify what features of these encounters are helpful in exploring options. We will be able to identify the behaviours that best support shared decision making.”
“In addition, our focus groups with both patients and clinicians help us to learn about how decisions on care for tinnitus are made both in clinical encounters and more broadly. We are working alongside a team at Dartmouth College in the US to develop an Option Grid decision aid.”
The Option Grid decision aid is a one page document that compares the different treatment approaches for tinnitus and enables people to weigh up the pros and cons of different approaches. It describes how each approach helps, how they work and the way they help reduce the impact of tinnitus. Ultimately this will improve the way that services support people with tinnitus by understanding what works best, how to individualise care for people and how to communicate most helpfully.”
“By July this year we look forward to having completed our data gathering and analysis phases, publishing our work and producing a finalised decision aid.”
