A belated post about my article for the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps. It is available here but alas not in full text. Indeed I am not sure I am allowed to link to a full-text version as that would make it open access and that in turn makes it expensive to publish.
Anyhow, it was published, and I am clearly delighted that at the ripe old age of 50, I have discovered chapter 3 (or 4) of my career. I found the whole process of designing the questionnaire, setting it up on a commercial survey website, seeing the responses come in, importing into Nvivo and doing the thematic analysis fascinating. After this, relating it to what I had read and understood from the literature, what was replicated, what was new. I was enthralled, and I can see what makes research so exciting (although this wasn’t research, it was a service evaluation).
I hope I can do some more work on PBSGL and its impact. Indeed the next area is to incorporate our Practice Nurse cadre into it, so we have a genuinely interprofessional demographic.
I think the next areas I am going to divert my attention to are how a GP Registrar and/or a GP answers a clinical question (in response to a DEN) and an exploration of the impact of NFCI on a soldier. Two completely separate things but also aligning with my day job. It means more literature searches and more protocol writing, but I think both areas will reveal some rich data and stimulate debate. My hypotheses (if one can have one when undertaking a ‘service evaluation’) are that the former will throw up some concerns and under-utilisation of Web 2.0/SMS in answering clinical questions. I think the latter will demonstrate a significant psychological overlay in neuropathy (NFCI) with a subsequent effect on ADLs, and that the first line of treatment should be a set number of early CBT/psychological interventions to mitigate against longer-term disability.
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