Edinburgh Napier University

  Living with a chronic illness can impact on many aspects of people’s lives such as mental, social and financial wellbeing. GP practices were encouraged to look for depression in people with long term conditions, but new research casts doubts on its effectiveness in addressing mental health needs. For many people their surrounding life circumstances, alongside their physical health problems both impact on their mental well-being, which in turn can further impact on their physical health and their ability to self care. Addressing peoples physical, mental and social care needs might help people to take better care of themselves and improve overall health and wellbeing.
This study will use a new tool, the Patient Centred Assessment Method (PCAM), to see if it can help nurses do better in addressing the physical, mental and social needs of patients. We need to know whether the tool can be used by nurses, whether it is acceptable to them and to patients, and how best to implement it. We would also
need to see if it leads to better patient care and outcomes before it could be rolled out across the NHS. To do this we need to run a feasibility trial which will let us know if it is possible to run a full trial before committing valuable research and NHS resources.
This collaborative NIHR project is led by University of Stirling (grant reference, 13/33/16, total project value £345,895)