What is Burden of Treatment
If you've been following me on twitter you have likely picked up on the fact that my PhD centers around Burden of Treatment. But what exactly is this?
You're not feeling well, lets say as an example you think you have a chest infection. If you want to get better there are things that you will have to do to get better. Step one you need to be seen by a doctor. So you call a GP and spend 30 minutes waiting to talk to a receptionist. After listening to your concerns best case the receptionists gives you an appointment with a GP that day. Step two with an appointment in hand you now need to co-ordinate and organize your day around getting to the GP for this appointment. Next you actually need to attend the appointment and effectively communicate your symptoms to the GP so that they will be able to deduce what is wrong and give you the right course of treatment. Step three the doctor will decide on a diagnosis and inform you of that, give you a prescription, and likely offer some lifestyle advice. Now you need to make your way to a pharmacy, fill the prescription pay for it, and take on board the instructions specific to that medication. Finally you now need to incorporate that medication into your life, remember to take it at the right time as well as adapt your life to promote healing and recovery. All of this work takes time, energy, and changes your plans for a given time period. Now imagine how much more complex these tasks would be if instead of a chest infection your diagnosis instead is a life long condition.
Most likely, in addition to managing multiple medications, multiple health appointment, and learning about your condition; you will also need to monitor your condition at home, make major changes to your lifestyle and diet. You will need to learn about your condition and how to manage it. Further the illness will likely affect your ability to work, relate to others, and you capacity to do the things you enjoy. Illness and health management is a complex task that requires a high level of skill and individual engagement that most health care practitioners assume the patients will do to optimize their health.
This is a simple definition of Burden of Treatment: the work required to manage illness and the impact that work has on your life, along with your ability to complete that work. What I'm interested in, is exploring if there are modifiable factors which might help us as healthcare practitioners ( doctors, nurses, physio's, etc) alter the amount of work that patients have to do. To this end I am starting by asking the question; do symptoms experienced in heart failure change the amount of work that must be done to manage the condition? The first step to finding the answer to this question I am conducting a Qualitative Systematic Literature Review, the details of which you can find here:
After this the plan is to do further exploration in this area by involving individuals with heart failure, but this plan is still under development. This is merely a brief introduction to my PhD project and I plan on updating this as my knowledge and project develops.
If you are interested in this topic and want to learn more I have listed a few resources below:
Academic papers:
NB: This is not an exhaustive list, merely a few of the publications I found helpful in learning more about Burden of Treatment. Iif you have comments or questions please do not hesitate to contact me.
