Before Arrival at Hospital (BeArH)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Before Arrival at Hospital: Factors affecting timing of admission to hospital for children with serious infectious illness (The BeArH project).
IRAS ID
226756
Contact name
Sarah J Neill
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Northampton
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 5 months, 31 days
Research summary
Infection is a major cause of childhood illness and death, in the UK and globally, in the first five years of life. Many deaths are avoidable as infections such as pneumonia and meningitis can be treated successfully. In the early stages of illness it is difficult to know which children will become seriously ill. However, in the UK parents are expected to use the right health service for the right level of illness, putting pressure on parents to make the right decision about when to access health services. To prevent avoidable child deaths, we need to know more about what affects the decisions that parents and professionals make when a child is sick before they are admitted to hospital.
Working with parents, our study aims to identify all the things that influence decisions that parents and professionals make so that we can develop strategies to try and make sure that children get help quickly when they have serious infectious illnesses (SIIs).
We plan to interview parents whose child has been in hospital with a SII and the HPs that the parents sought help from before their child was admitted. The study sites will be a district general hospital and a teaching hospital and their catchment areas. We will gather existing evidence, in each area, about local services, levels of service use and learning points from investigations concerning children with SII. Putting all of this information together will help us to identify what needs to change to help children with a SII obtain the right treatment as quickly as possible. Together with parents, we will use the findings to develop another project to plan the changes to the way that children with SII are managed before they get to hospital.
Supported by UK Sepsis Trust, Encephalitis Society, Meningitis Now and Meningitis Research Foundation.
REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/EM/0334
Date of REC Opinion
13 Nov 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion