Discussion of long-term preventative medications in primary care v1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Discussion of long-term Preventative Medications in primary care: secondary analysis study of recorded consultations
IRAS ID
323442
Contact name
Caitríona Callan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford Research Governance, Ethics and Assurance
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
This study aims to better understand how GPs and patients talk about long-term preventative medication. This will involve studying consultations recorded between 2016 and 2018 for the Harnessing resources from the internet to maximise outcomes from GP consultations (HaRI) study (21/SW/0088).
Many medications prescribed in primary care, such as statins or blood pressure medications, are aimed at preventing ill-health, but we know from previous research that medications are often not taken as prescribed, which increases the risks of disease complications (Mongkhon et al., 2018). Adherence (whether medication-taking matches recommendations from a prescriber) is often related to what patients believe about medications (Foot et al., 2016), but it is uncertain how medication beliefs and concerns are discussed in real-life consultations. Doctors frame how they recommend treatments to patients in a variety of ways (Stivers et al., 2018). However, we do not know how doctors recommend preventative medications, and how treatment recommendations in this context are received by patients.
We will analyse relevant consultations in the HaRI dataset to focus on two main areas: patients’ medication beliefs and concerns, and whether and how these are discussed; and recommendations for long-term preventative medications. We will analyse how treatment recommendations are made by clinicians during the consultations, using a categorisation of ways of making treatment recommendations developed previously by researchers (Stivers et al., 2018). If the ways in which recommendations of long-term preventative medications are not explained by this categorisation, to explore consultations in more depth we may use conversation analysis, a method of studying verbal and non-verbal human interaction, to explore how communication choices of GPs impact on the interaction.REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/EM/0112
Date of REC Opinion
16 May 2023
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion