Improving Continence Interventions and Services
Enhancing dignity and control in later life transition: the impact of matching care to need on health outcomes, in people with incontinence.
Work Packages
Click on a button on above to find out more about each Work Package.
Aims
To compare specialist versus standard continence care in terms of patient and carer psychosocial, health, and service use outcomes.
To investigate the concordance in older people's, carers' and health and social care professional's views on care approaches to continence management and continence service characteristics.
Objectives
To compare continence-specific quality of life outcomes for older people and their family carers who experience different continence care pathways.
To investigate how older people with incontinence perceive the cause of their condition, and their attitudes and perceived barriers to seeking help and treatment.
To investigate how older people with incontinence, and their family carers, perceive their health and social care service needs and the preferred characteristics of those services.
To investigate health and social care professionals' views on continence service provision, and the concordance or disparity between professionals' views and those of older people and their carers.
Methods
Study 1 - Patient interviews
Study 2 - Health and social care service manager interviews
Deliverables
New guidelines for clinical continence care to maximise continence management and quality of life and optimise levels of service use in older people and continence.
A cost-benefit analysis of specialist vs. standard clinical continence care.
New health promotion guidelines for overcoming barriers to help-seeking in older people with continence problems.
New guidelines for health and social care professionals to support service provision delivery that is tailored to the needs of older people and their Carers.
Progress to date
The University Sheffield, Dalarna Research Institute and Dalarna University
Currently, we are discussing project arrangements with the specialist continence clinic in Barnsley who will be helping us to recruit patients and carers. We are also initiating links in Sheffield to facilitate access to patients receiving generic continence care. We will be asking what characteristics of health and social care services are most important to patients and carers and investigating what patients and families believe about the causes of incontinence and what might encourage them or stop them from seeking help with the problem. Data collection is due to begin early next year.
