Summary
Invitation to sign up your practice to long COVID research, plus more research opportunities with NIHR.
GP practices interested in supporting research into long COVID can sign up to the Research for the Future programme.
The programme is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Clinical Research Network (NIHR CRN) and the NHS.
It aims to help the NHS prevent and treat a range of long-term health conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as well as long COVID.
Practices that register with the programme will essentially be giving permission to the Research for the Future programme to send text messages to their patients via iPLATO.
Messages will only be sent to people aged 18-plus and they will invite them to register for the programme via a link. The messages will be sent from ‘NHS-NoReply’.
The programme is co-funded by NHSE via GMEC SCNs, Health Innovation Manchester and NIHR CRN Greater Manchester, and led by Professor Nawar Bakerly, who is the strategic clinical lead for respiratory medicine at the Northern Care Alliance, and Greater Manchester clinical lead for long COVID Tier 4 services.
More than 8,000 people are already signed up to the research database, but the programme is aiming to triple that number to understand the disease better.
Other research offers from the NIHR CRN Greater Manchester include:
TIMES – Currently available treatments for sleep disturbance in People Living with Dementia (PLWD) or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) are not always effective. New assessment and management techniques that adopt a tailored, whole-person, approach to care may improve the ability to address this issue.
TIMES is an online decision-support tool that aims to help GPs deliver tailored care plans to improve sleep disturbance for PLWD/MCI.
The study team is seeking eight GP practices in England for a feasibility trial to identify, invite, and recruit PLWD/MCI with problematic sleep disturbance, together with their carers (family or professional i.e. in care homes) in pairs (patient-carer dyads). GP practices will be cluster randomised to deliver either usual care or delivery of the TIMES intervention.
ATHENA – Approximately 30 per cent of people get Herpes Zoster or ‘shingles’ and it is more common in people over the age of 50. It causes a painful, blistering rash, which lasts up to four weeks. The most common complication of shingles is post-herpetic neuralgia, which can be disabling for months to years. The early administration of antivirals (within 72 hours of rash onset but up to one week) reduces the acute pain of HZ but has never been shown to reduce the incidence of post-herpetic neuralgia.
The study team is looking to compare the clinical effectiveness of low-dose amitriptyline to placebo for the prevention of PHN at 90 days.
INDIGO Community – The study uses questionnaires to help understand how a patient feels about their quality of life and experiences of care. Using a digital survey tool, the study hopes to run a project that will help understand more about the lives of patients after treatment for cancer. They plan to see which patient-reported outcome measures (PROMS) allow participants to express their quality of life, as rated by the participants. The study will also explore how to keep the amount of time and effort needed to complete the questionnaires as low as possible.
A full list of all available studies in general practice can be found on the NIHR Primary Care Research Hub.
You can also get in touch with the team by emailing: researchsupport.crngm@nihr.ac.uk
Finally, the European Pharmaceutical Review has published an article about COPD by one of the CRN GM’s research active GPs, Dr Pete Wilson from Middlewood Partnership in Macclesfield.
More information about clinical research and the work of NIHR CRN GM can be found on the PCB website.
