NPT, decision-making near death, & Qualitative Methods

My program of research with Alison Richardson on Complexity and Patient Experience in End of Life Care is gathering momentum. An important part of this program is work that seeks to improve communications and decision-making in challenging situations. A new paper with our Postdoctoral Fellow Susi Lund is published in PLoS ONE today. We used NPT to structure a systematic review of qualitative studies of the implementation of advance care plans in the care of people with terminal illnesses, and to develop an explanatory model of processes that increase or decrease clinicians confidence in the use of advance care plans. Click here to download the paper.

Our programme of work on developing and refining Normalization Process Theory is also growing, and 2015 promises to be an exciting year for this work. Cathy Pope and I will be leading an NPT workshop in Tromso, Norway, on 8 April  (contact Hege.Andreassen@telemed.no if you’d like to attend). I’ll be giving a much shorter introduction to NPT for staff and students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Southampton University at 3.30-5pm on 14 May, but there will be some spaces for visitors too. Let me know if you’d like to attend.

If you’re down under (or heading down under) and you’re planning to attend the big IIQM Qualitative Methods extravanganza in Melbourne – and I hope you are – I’m doing the opening plenary. Just for once I’m not talking about NPT, Burden of Treatment, or Minimally Disruptive Medicine. I'm also doing a workshop on ‘the basic mechanics of theory building’ which I hope students and early career researchers will find useful. There are still about seven places left at my workshop, and there are few places at other workshops too. Sally Thorne from UBC is doing a great workshop on data analysis in applied health research; and Alex Clark (Alberta) will be doing a really useful session on grant proposal writing. Check out the  the workshop time table here.