We're holding a one day meeting here in Southampton to think about Burden of Treatment and multimorbidity towards the end of life. Speakers include Frances Mair (primary care) and Carol Davis (palliative care), and me. The meeting is free and lunch is provided. Because of a late drop out we have one vacant spot at this meeting. If you want to come, email me at c.r.may@soton.ac.uk - it will be first come first served I'm afraid!

I'm very excited to be travelling to Melbourne this summer. I'll be spending time in the Department of General Practice at Melbourne University working with old friends and making new ones. I'll be introducing Burden of Treatment Theory - and adding a twist - in a public lecture on the 13th of August. I'm then participating in one of the Department's brilliant short courses on implementation - I'll be speaking about Normalization Process Theory on the 14th of August. 

Click here for information about my Burden of Treatment talk

Click here for details about the Melbourne Implementation Science Masterclass.

Being sick is sometimes hard and heavy work. Our new paper sets out a rigorous theoretical framework for analyzing this work, and understanding its effects, not just on people with health problems, but on their significant others too. This paper draws together the work of researchers in Southampton, Glasgow and at the Mayo Clinic. It has policy and clinical applications  because it helps us to understand important aspects of health and help-seeking behaviours and health service utilization, and to understand how the work of being sick gets embedded across the boundaries between healthcare and self-care.

You can get the paper here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/14/281/abstract 

I'm really looking forward to travelling up the Newcastle this week to speak that the BSA's Applied Qualitative Researcher's meeting hosted by Catherine Exley and Rose Barbour. It should be good fun. I'm not sure that I hold with the distinction between applied and 'pure' research, and I do think that the more applied my research has become, the more it has generated theory. In my talk I'm going to explore some of the reasons that this has happened. One thing that I might reflect on is how applied, problem-solving qualitative research can help us 'road-test' theories. his was just what I found when I visited the EU RESTORE group in Dublin led by Anne MacFarlane. The RESTORE group are working on improving primary care for migrant communities in Europe - they're using NPT as the basis for their work, and showing us how applied qualitative research can really make a difference.

My colleagues Catherine Pope, Susan Halford and Mark Weal have been awarded the Sage Prize of Innovation and Excellence in Sociology for their work on the Semantic Web. You can read their outstanding paper here. 

Rachel MacEvoy and colleagues in Limerick have just published a systematic review of studies using Normalization Process Theory. This is one of the results of Anne MacFarlane's outstanding EU funded RESTORE Study. In Glasgow meanwhile, Susan Browne and colleagues in Glasgow have just published a great paper looking at the experience of people with heart failure, exploring this through the lenses of NPT and Minimally Disruptive Medicine.