Category: Research

Sarcoma, COVID, science, BREXIT and Trump – what a year

I have not written in this blog since January of 2020. It has been some year and while I have been busy, the COVID-19 tragedy has been unfolding and our government has been deepening its self-created chaos around Brexit. Meanwhile the politics of the world have been changing. It is impossible to disentangle it all but I will have a go at summarising the year.

I have been busy because the world of sarcoma and canecr advocacy more generally doesn’t substantially change despite the pandemic. With sarcoma we have a disease which is rare, heterogenous (about 150 different histologies), and inherently complex. It is difficult to diagnose, requires specialist knowledge to treat and effective medical treatment options are scarce. There is limited access to research for patients and many studies of new treatments fail. Effective patient advocacy to help create change is desperately needed around the world but is largely unfunded. My life in the last four years has been about travelling Europe for meetings and events. That shuddered dramatically to a halt in March. I have not missed airports, life has been interesting on Zoom and Teams but I have missed the conversations over coffee or lunch.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been tragic. Our government has consistently acted too late at the cost of lives, it has splashed money into the hands of incompetents and crooks (known as friends), ignored existing skills in the community (to benefit its friends), and its leader has lied, bumbled and blustered throughout. Ministers have ignored the importance of giving the public ‘understanding’ and relied on them to try to process information for themselves. Giving clear and simple explanations is not patronising, giving simplistic ones is. What we needed was the advice to avoid closed unventilated space, avoid crowds, avoid close conversation – instead we were told to wash our hands, wear a mask, and keep 2m away from others. One is about contexts of life and prevention and is simple. The other is about self-protection without any reason or context and is simplistic. No wonder you got crowds, people gathering indoors and politicians having unmasked close chats. In addition there has been an almost pathological addiction to big populist promises that cannot be kept, not least is the world-class test and trace disaster.

What stems from this could be an exciting opportunity for science, which has seen itself in the headlines more than ever before. The politicians mantra of “following the science” (which it soon became obvious that they weren’t) subtly morphed into “being advised by the science” (which allowed them to openly ignore it). Fortunately we do have a lot of honest scientists who will not be over-awed or bullied and who can communicate effectively. If we are lucky the demonstrations of the influence science can have should excite more young people.

The treachery of Brexit has also been a huge collection of extended promises. Lies built upon lies, reality ignored, vain hopes sold to the electorate which then evaporated, ideas of quick agreement became extended negotiations, irrational short term solutions disappeared as the real world emerged – it was predictable. The extended promises of 2016 were unfounded and sadly those who manufactured those lies came into power determined to deliver their desired outcome without any of the benefits they had similarly promised and causing a level of damage not done to the British economy and social-life since the 1940s. A Cabinet of self-serving Westminster cowboys, yes-men too lily-livered to stand up to bullying and admit to what was right. And now they are threatening to use gunboats in the English Channel!

Deepening the tragedy on the world stage has been the pantomime dame of American politics. The cringing performances of a coiffed man with a 10-year old’s vocabulary, the emotional sensitivity of a steam hammer and a view of the world that comes from one of those crazy mirror stalls at a funfair, moved us beyond laughter, to tears, to sending condolences to American friends. Welcome to the new 80-year old king, he will need to show steel to steal the show as the next act unfolds.

Oh dear, what a year. Well that’s it, I’ve had my say.

If you want Patient Involvement there are no compromises

There is a new healthcare industry. Patient involvement became inclusive as ‘patient and public involvement’ (PPI) and is now rapidly becoming ‘public involvement’. In research it is acquiring an energy, a workforce, an academic community all of its own. We have advice from regulatory bodies, published standards, endless guidance and retrospective analyses of experience in small very specific case studies. We have started to see systematic reviews, with inconclusive conclusions. We have a journal of our own. We even have privatisation as an issue. It is however a uniquely British development and I would argue that we have lost sight of what it is really all about.

Let me put my cards on the table. I attended my first research meeting as a cancer patient in 2002. I am a journalist by background with a long management experience. I am curious, analytical, occasionally creative, and sometimes abrasive. In 2005 I co-wrote the patient involvement plans of UKCRN, the first iteration of what has become NIHR CRN. I attended the DoH interview from which the contract was awarded and took the part-time role of Associate Director for Patient Involvement. I had to relinquish that in 2007 when I required further treatment for my cancer which left me disabled.

I have spent a lot of time in the last year with the largest European cancer research organisation, EORTC. The European Organisation for the Research & Treatment of Cancer is not an EU institution although it does get some project funding from EU sources. EORTC is a Belgian charity, founded over 60 years ago, is currently running or in follow-up with about 200 clinical trials, and employs about 200 staff – methodologists, statisticians, doctors and research scientists. It has partnerships across the world, engages hundreds of European clinician/researchers with specific tumour specialisms and has an influential policy voice. EORTC is considering how patient involvement can be brought into its core activities, there is already some involvement in the tumour study groups. Note that this is patient involvement, there is no role for the public.

In 8 of the last 13 years I have been a patient member of faculty for the MCCR Workshop run in Europe. There is a similar workshop in the USA. This Workshop is an intensive six day course for young oncologists from all around the world. They all have an ambition for research in their clinical career. About a quarter of them are working in the NHS. Many of these young doctors have never talked with a patient about their research before – the exceptions being those from the NHS. None of them however wants a non-patient to be involved with the study they develop on the course. They can accept that I may not have experience of the specific tumour type they are proposing to research but they recognise that I bring a viewpoint from an experience they have not had and that I understand issues in a different way although it is one which is relevant to their plans.

This experience is making me focus quite hard on what I think is essential. I want to get away from the plans that large-scale UK organisations seem to have to simplify terminology and create ill-defined systems which drive relevance out of the original intent.

Our intent back in 2005 was patient involvement. There was a lot of discussion about the use of the word ‘patient’. Cancer was using ‘consumer’ (as NCRI still does) because it allowed carers to be included, in mental health the term ‘service user’ allowed inclusion of family/carers to address some of the communications challenges which exist. Whatever the term actually used the binding principle was that of the ‘lived experience’ – although we had not defined that term then.  The objective was to replicate in the wider healthcare research community some of the benefits which the introduction of a structure for patient involvement had achieved in cancer research through NCRN.  That in turn had learned from HIV/AIDS research in the 1990s where the Medical Research Council had opened its doors to patient involvement.

Patient involvement in research has a clear objective, to enable better research, relevant to patients, which can be explained easily to patients, implemented more readily and can realise benefits for patients more quickly. When I joined my first cancer research meeting in 2002 that was the aim and it remains the aim.

So how did the primary need for ‘patient involvement’ become subsumed, its purposes obscured, into a woolly agenda driven out of organisation speak and something ill-defined called ‘inclusion’? I will let others answer that question. Then there is that appalling trio of PPI. Get rid of it.

Lets get back to core principles. You can have as much or as little ‘public involvement’ as you like, just get on and do it and don’t bother me with it. 

We should focus on ‘patient involvement’ and resolving the challenges it faces. The issue of identifying impact should be rejected. No research group assesses its staff on their ‘impact’, the view is more rounded than that.  Involving patients is a cultural issue, it represents change, and such change can only be assessed by looking at the organisational culture in a structured analytical manner.  As far as I am aware only the NCRI has ever done this, and then perhaps not consciously.  Considering the performance of individuals is a different matter and is closely related to the challenges of recruiting, training and supporting patients to be involved. We find it difficult to identify and turn away poor performers. Many organisations, including NCRI, have solved all of this but the indications are that each resolution is specific to each situation. We can do this. It is not easy but it can be done. The will is there among researchers and among patients, if only you can get to them, given all the obstructions that are put in the way.

People with the ‘lived experience’, not the public, will change research for the better. The easy term is ‘patient involvement’ but we have to treat that as a generic, accepting that it needs refining in different situations. Properly implemented involvement of people with the lived experience is what we must be talking about and getting on with. 

Lets not lose sight of this.

Patient Involvement is NOT a sub-set of Public Involvement

I happily acknowledge the experience and thought about this issue which others have expressed but I do not want us to lose sight of the uniqueness of patient involvement. I care little about public involvement, I want to see patient involvement where it matters in areas where research can improve the quality of treatment and care. The differences with public involvement are more than semantics, it is about ‘lived experience’.

I also acknowledge that not everyone likes the term patient and that differing disease contexts use slightly different language. That is why the phrase ‘lived experience’ is so important. It includes carers, especially in those diseases and contexts where patient communication is problematic, where children are concerned, and in diseases where survival is poor.

In much of clinical research unconditional patient involvement is necessary. The lived experience, viewpoint and thinking of patients and carers cannot be provided by anyone else, can influence study design and provides important insights throughout the life of a clinical trial.

Whether any single person can be representative of ‘lived experience’ is a matter for discussion within each context. It is important and should be thought through by patients and researchers together prior to starting work on the study. It is of little use recruiting me to comment on a bone sarcoma study which impacts on teenagers, I am a soft tissue sarcoma patient and my teenage years are distant past. 

It is worth recalling that when the UKCRN was formed back in 2005 (it is the precursor to NIHR CRN CC) it had an Associate Director for Patient Involvement. Public involvement was a sideline issue.

So let me be vocal and unequivocal, patient involvement represented by the ‘lived experience’ is not a sub-set of public involvement and should never be gratuitously lumped into it for academic or organisational convenience. 

Your diagnosis madam – collateral damage

No cancer patient should be seen as collateral damage after a clinical procedure which diagnoses  otherwise unexpected cancer.

That is what happens with most uterine leiomyosarcoma and some other gynaecological sarcoma diagnoses. These patients are among the worst treated cancer patients because not only are they usually diagnosed after radical surgery, many are subjected to inappropriate adjuvant radiotherapy with consequential long term side effects, and some are given adjuvant chemotherapy which has no evidence of benefit – except perhaps to assuage the guilt of their gynaecologist.

The gynaecology community has been challenged over these issues yet takes few steps to try to answer the problems. In the UK we are moving forward by requiring all these patients to be referred for joint care at diagnosis by a specialist sarcoma team. Hopefully this will reduce the burden of adjuvant therapy, improve follow-up and open up access to appropriate new sarcoma treatments. This has met consistent resistance but the NHS is enforcing it. Elsewhere in the world it does not of course apply.

Gynae sarcomas account for less than 1% of all gynae cancers. Many are hidden by uterine fibroids and are only discovered after surgery. Sometimes that surgery breaks up fibroids and distributes sarcoma cells around. As far as gynaecologists are concerned that is ‘tough luck’, nothing they could have done better, disease spreads, patient dies (eventually), collateral damage.

Where there are problems in healthcare there is usually research. Around gynae sarcomas the only research is with drugs for post-operative adjuvant therapy or advanced disease, valuable but not enough and nothing yet found to make a significant difference. Gynae and sarcoma specialists collaborate in these studies. There is no research into trying to identify a biomarker from blood or imaging to try and achieve a diagnosis before surgery where fibroids are concerned. There must be other ideas. No-one is ‘thinking outside the box’. Sarcoma clinicians cannot do that research, they don’t see the patients until they are already collateral damage.

I first met gynae sarcoma patients online in email support lists. I have known several personally and I know some survivors. Of course for some the journey has been supported by good and caring clinicians and its not all bad news. But it is a hidden issue, no-one talks about it. There are so few of these patients to start with that creating a campaign has been impossible. We need to energise this in different ways, its not enough just to be shouting from the sidelines.

The first step is for healthcare systems to openly recognise this problem. In the UK we are slowly moving forward. The NHS is taking steps because of pressure from the sarcoma community. NICE needs to recognise that it has failed these patients. NIHR and other research funders should identify and fund a priority. NCRI should be encouraging researchers. Women’s cancer advocates need to wake up to this challenge. But that is just the UK.

Lets care about collateral damage, research could solve this.

Journal publishing – get rid of the pay wall

There is a situation which we, as patients, have been slow to challenge.

If I say that patients agree to enter clinical studies, which take data from patients, and reports on those studies are then published in medical journals after due review processes have taken place, and are then put on sale, I wonder if you see the problem.

If we as patients want to see the study result, review the data etc we have to pay – usually a fee around $30, sometimes more. We don’t buy because we do not have the resources. We cannot get free access because we do not belong to a body which licences access for its members through Athens or Shibboleth. So we are left with the abstract, at best. Fortunately a number of journals are Open Access, allowing anyone full access to published reports. Some also offer Open Access as a paid option but notably the High Impact journals will usually only offer Open Access if the study sponsor pays a substantial fee up front.

Patient advocates and those relying on understanding research are disadvantaged by the publications system. Some authors are generous and subject to keeping quiet about it let us have a copy of their study report. Sometimes we are able to find a print copy, take photos on a mobile phone and thereby have a reference copy, but that is getting silly isn’t it?

I started to wonder what the ethics of all this are. Patients freely enter studies, unpaid. Their data is gathered, analysed and written up under an ethical process. If it is then published and they cannot access it, is that ethical? The actual patients in that study may well get a copy of the report from the study team which might answer the direct question, but patient advocates and representatives who could use these data in their work for the benefit of patients do not have such access. Is that unethical, or just hard b***** luck?

What makes this worse of course is that patients and the public fund a lot of this research, whether through taxation or charitable giving.

We have to recognise that publishers have to earn a living and that there are various business models available to them in practical terms. We can only applaud those who have an Open Access policy.

It has to be better than this. I cannot see an easy route through but I hope someone can grasp this nettle and help patient representatives get better informed and become more effective.

Personalised medicine and accelerated access

Once upon a time a new cancer drug achieved marketing authorisation after randomised controlled trials demonstrated effectiveness treating carefully calculated numbers of patients with a given disease or condition. The critical patient outcome for the trials was a comparison between the experimental and control arms using a measure of patient survival which gave a high degree of statistical significance. It was also important that safety was demonstrated and that side effects were tolerable and manageable.

We are entering an era where a drug with a specific mode of action for a specific genetic alteration can achieve marketing authorisation in an accelerated process after small clinical studies, offering no comparative data, using endpoints where patient benefit is unclear, and without long term measurement of issues such as survival or side effects. 

We made this transition, seemingly without open debate amongst stakeholders. The move is justified by the term “personalised medicine”, which in its fullest sense would include radiotherapy and surgery but is usually focussed exclusively on drugs. It has been carried along by enthusiasm and hype and it requires genetic testing, the demand for which is driving costs down. Technology is proving disruptive.

But patients have lost something in this transition. The science behind repeating studies, using control arms, good statistical practice, endpoints with real meaning etc has been built-up over years. It is robust good practice and provides a very high level of certainty that authorised drugs deliver patient benefit safely. Based on the data at registration these new drugs promise hope for a few but uncertain patient benefit overall.

It is important to acknowledge that when a treatment has a high probability of treating a disease effectively then practice needs to change so that relevant patients can be treated without delay.  We are now recognising that in doing so we lose important evidence which is very relevant to patients and society, even if it is less important to pharmaceutical companies.

What about dose determination, treatment sequencing, duration of treatment, combination therapies, toxicity management, quality of life, patient compliance? They all get forgotten in the rush to get the treatment into routine practice where we are reassured that any problems which arise will be handled by doctors. Perhaps, but their experience is not shared and collectively analysed as it would be in a study. Evidence based medicine it is not. Nor is it truly personalised medicine, it is simply drug-centred medicine.

However, patients want it. They want the tests and if they are eligible they want the treatment.

Some patients will be denied by cost. These drugs are expensive. Larotrectinib, approved by the FDA for a rare mutation in a wide range of cancers based on data from 55 patients, is estimated to cost over $330,000 a year – assuming anyone lives for a year. Compassionate and discounted programmes are available but no major HTA body has yet got into discussion with the drug company. There will soon be tales of patients selling homes and using crowd-funding to raise the money for drugs like this.

We must move fast to apply scientific process and rigour to personalised medicine. It is not about denying treatment to anyone. Drug companies must not determine what happens, much as they might wish to. At present they are succeeding. We must change the balance. Put patient interests at the centre of drug regulation, not pharma interests.

So what are our interests? Safety (the minimum effective dose), side effects (nature, treatment, duration), duration of response to treatment (combination therapy, therapy sequencing), longevity (real life outcomes), quality of life (in all its dimensions), holistic issues of care, cost.

Establishing this kind of treatment optimisation is a theme supported by European research organisations, professional associations, patient groups and by a considerable body of influential MEPs. The move calls for protocols to guide treatment and for data to be gathered centrally for all treatments which use an accelerated approval process. By gathering data prospectively according to a protocol we can avoid bias and a picture can emerge dynamically as a treatment gathers numbers of patients. Quite separately the FDA has suggested a form of ‘synthetic’ control group based on historical data to empower comparison. 

This might result in treatments which are not effective, and we might see treatments which patients dislike, using patient reported outcomes. These treatments could be withdrawn, that would be an innovation. This kind of treatment optimisation approach importantly provides a framework for testing lower dose levels than were used in the trials for drug registration. This is not a favoured idea of drug companies either.

Support Treatment Optimisation, it is in our interests as patients.

Sarcoma diagnosis – a new challenge emerges  

Conversations at the recent British Sarcoma Group conference in London (an excellent event) brought up a growing problem with a recent change in the guidance for GPs considering potential cancer symptoms. The idea is that when a GP has suspicions about a soft-tissue lump he can order a direct ultra-sound scan.  When I questioned the chair of the NICE Guideline Group during its development I was assured they had considered all outcomes and my concerns were dismissed. As far as I am aware no specific sarcoma expertise was consulted during the development process.

The question which needs answering is whether the new approach is working for the benefit of patients and/or the NHS.

Prior to the change three years ago a GP was advised to make a 2-week referral to a specialist centre if certain clinical symptoms existed.  More patients were actually being diagnosed from non-urgent secondary care referrals or other routes than from the 2-week system. Hence the change, which made direct access to x-rays (for suspected bone sarcomas) and ultra-sound (for soft-tissue tumours) available to GPs so they can diagnose non-malignant tumours or determine uncertainty which requires expertise.

The problems arise because sarcomas are rare, diverse in their histology and can appear in any location on the body – in fact ‘typical’ is not an adjective applicable to sarcoma. The ratio of benign soft tissue tumours to malignant sarcomas is over 100:1. The rarity means ultra-sound imaging technicians have little familiarity with sarcoma although for bone tumours X-rays can be definitive.

We are finding that ultra-sound imaging reports will err on the safe side. Some tumours are clearly benign but if they have any doubt they are likely to say that they cannot be certain.  So what do GPs do with this uncertainty?  Their uncertainty boundary has shifted so they make a 2-week referral to a specialist centre, even for a tumour which under the old guidance would have been recognised as benign.

Thus specialist sarcoma centres are being overwhelmed by urgent referrals for ‘uncertain’ tumours. Diagnostic expertise is now being exercised by nurses operating triage clinics. This allows their consultant colleagues to spend longer with the fewer potentially malignant cases who come through the triage.  The people with sarcoma who would benefit from urgent attention are being hidden in a cloud of benign conditions until a late moment in the process. GPs are allowed to opt out of responsibility for diagnosing the benign condition, hiding behind the ‘uncertain’ ultra-sound. Those with benign conditions suffer a journey to a regional specialist cancer centre only to be told by a nurse that their highly qualified GP must re-consider their case.

Patients are not being respected. The problem is not the principle of the new guidance, but the implementation which has shifted the workload inappropriately. Those picking up the pieces are the specialist centres overloaded with diagnostic work. The new guidance was intended to help them and it is doubtful whether this is leading to earlier diagnosis of malignant tumours either.  The whole approach needs review in the light of the experience the sarcoma centres are reporting and any review must be in collaboration with them, rather than imposed by a committee led from primary care.

Ask the right questions, get the right evidence

This is the second of my two thoughts about pressures being faced by patient advocacy.

There have been a number of recent articles in journals lamenting the failure of patient advocates to respect the principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM). It is a consistent low grumble from the science community, to which a small group are deeply wedded, while a majority probably have some sympathy with the point but also have some sympathy with the stance being taken by patient advocates.

There has been a change in the attitudes of regulators. Not that long ago they too were wedded to the evidence-base and they would maintain that this principle still underpins their decision-making. But in that decision-making, and therefore in the processes and procedures they employ, they are being more pragmatic. That has been partly driven by patient advocacy.

Some voices in the regulatory community are also identifying the issue which I believe needs to be addressed and which EBM protagonists seem to be studiously ignoring.  It is quite a big question.

Are we gathering the right evidence in clinical trials and in the way we measure and report real-world clinical care?

No-one in medical research seems to be addressing this effectively. A few are tinkering around the edge of the issue and for some, the idea that we are not gathering the right evidence, is like voicing heresy.

Cancer clinical trials are focussed on some measure of survival or tumour response to treatment. The so-called ‘gold standard’ measure of Overall Survival becomes difficult when a treatment is one of a succession of different therapies. A wide range of surrogate measures are used as a substitute. These are often dependent on some degree of investigator interpretation so are inherently unreliable, a factor which it is convenient to forget.  Side effects of treatment are an important issue and these are reported too, usually using an investigator applied judgement of severity against the CTCAE standards.

All this is a focus on objective measurement of the disease and the effect the treatment has on the disease. No-one is denying that this is important but where are the measures focussed on the patients themselves and the effect on them, their subjective reporting.

This is what patient advocates have been pursuing with their regulatory campaigns which the EBM stalwarts claim ignore the evidence-base. The advocates have an evidence-base in patient stories and anecdotes, but it is not one which they are in a position to measure, the professionals are not measuring it and have been ignoring it for more than twenty years.  So the EBM complainants, writing stridently about patient advocates not playing their game, would do well to look at themselves and their colleagues.

Are they asking all the right questions: are they gathering all the right evidence?

There is a side issue here about patient involvement. It is an issue which patient involvement cannot easily address and could be used as an excuse for inaction. Untrained involved patients do not necessarily see this ‘right evidence’ issue, they are often overwhelmed with understanding the planned outcomes and endpoints in a study. This assumes, of course, that they are consulted at a timepoint when they can actually input such ideas.

The second side issue is that we have much better ‘big data’ now than we have ever had. The ability to look at clinical practice across years, aggregating the experience of thousands of patients, means that retrospective analysis can provide valuable information and new insights. The question is, are we asking all the right questions in these analyses if the right questions were not asked when the data was being first gathered?

So the challenge for the data analysts is not to turn EBM into a self-justifying paralysis of ideas which ignores the patient?

Pressures are building on patient advocacy

Two pressures are building on patient advocacy. We do need to draw a line here between patient advocacyand patient involvement. The former are patients or professionals working towards a specific objective such as getting a new treatment approved, or raising awareness of an issue amongst politicians. That can be correctly called advocacy. Patient involvementis the drawing in of patients with ‘lived experience’ to a structure so that their experience based input, whether considered or ad hoc, can be taken into account alongside other views. There is of course no clear boundary line, partly because the same patients can be doing both. The two terms can be confused and issues which apply to one can also be inappropriately applied to the other.

What are these two pressures, and why are they unique to theadvocacyagenda?

The first is the influence of pharma companies, the funding they provide to patient charities and the influence that the funding opens up. There are regular, sometimes well informed, articles in both professional journals and the wider press raising concerns.

These concerns are real because recent history shows us what can happen. One example was a breast cancer charity that accepted funding for a policy post which actively promoted that pharma company’s drug to politicians and created patient activity supporting it. Quite often funding was sheltered through a local PR company.  Matters became more subtle in the mid 2000s and funding related to ‘projects’ rather than core activities. One not unusual ‘project’ was funding charity staff to attend an educational conference at a foreign and very pleasant venue, all costs covered. Regulations which required openness about funding followed and pharma companies now declare who and what they have funded in great detail. Charities have no such regulatory requirement from the Charity Commission although many do declare what they have received and for what purpose. Some healthcare charities will not accept industry funding at all and declare that policy openly. It is not tidy and while this lack of openness remains there will always be critics eager to point fingers at one or the other party.

Where this becomes an issue is with regulatory affairs. Patient groups and charities are often asked to provide an input to regulatory discussion, usually a paper, sometimes representation at meetings. Questions about financial influence are part of the preparation and a declaration of potential conflicting interests is requested. Some regulators are less searching than others.  Charities all have a different approach to completion of these requests and I do not believe that any regulator has a requirement that the CEO must sign the declaration.  Understandably charities which have little or no involvement with industry find these forms tiresome, not always understanding their purpose. The aim is not to eliminate input but to provide a perspective which reflects the real-life of working with and supporting patients. I have spoken with regulatory committee members who tell me they weigh up what is put forward by patient advocates at a meeting, taking into account the declared potential for conflicts of interest, but not discounting the input provided.

It is time matters were tidied up. The Charity Commission could regulate how charities declare commercial grants in their accounts and charities themselves could carry a declarations page on their website, as some already do. The regulators could work together to have a common declaration approach and individual advocates should make declarations (already required by some regulators) so that their personal situation is clear.

If there was this kind of clarity pharma company lawyers might be able to stop twitching so much and make the matter of financial support where it is proper, appropriate and open happen more easily. In addition researchers or journalists who get a ‘bee in their bonnet’ about inappropriate influences could be quietened, although I doubt they will ever be eliminated and, to be fair, the questions need to be asked.

The second advocacy influence is about understanding evidence-based medicine. It overlaps with the first issue above because some pharma companies could be accused of fostering a preparedness to ignore evidence. More about that in my next contribution to the debate.

 

 

Questions, questions … but can we get them answered?

Academic interest in patient involvement has been dominated recently by evaluation. We at last have a growing recognition that involvement is not an intervention, like sticking a needle in, but an influence over process which acts subtly and sometimes covertly to effect change over a period of time. There is rarely a single identifiable point of ‘impact’, the change may be subtle and only evident through reporting by those involved, researchers, managers, funders and patients themselves.

So what is the next challenge for our researchers? There certainly seems to be plenty of  content, the challenge is finding the questions to resolve.  Lets try a list of unanswered questions, not worded yet as proper research questions and to be fair, some might not make it that far:

  • How do we draw the lines between patient and public in involvement?
  • What is “lived experience” for the purpose of defining patient involvement?
  • How do we ensure we get the right people for the right role?
  • How do we report involvement as a key element of research?
  • If we sack an involved patient how do we report that?
  • What questions should we ask researchers to help find the value of involvement?
  • How should we ask researchers those questions?
  • How can we remunerate involved patients without creating conflicts of interest?
  • Are there ethical issues we should address to empower more effective involvement?
  • Is effective involvement pragmatic, or driven by philosophical and cultural change?

That’s ten to start with. I could go on.

One of the challenges is getting these questions, and others like them, aired. In this world of evidence based medicine research proposals are usually supported by a literature search from which the prospective funders can identify that the research question is a valid one. Thus research builds up in an organic manner, with a traceable provenance. In patient involvement there is little evidence, as yet, in the literature with the result that provenance is largely impossible to identify. One of the challenges for researchers who wish to raise questions like these, even as a commentary or discussion point for a journal, is that there is no evidence to point to that the question is important. The editor will not publish. It is a chicken and egg situation.

I am suggesting something which steps outside the usual ‘evidence based medicine’ criteria. As usual, remember that this is a patient making the suggestion, I have only one interest – getting questions answered so that patient involvement improves.

My appeal is that those journals which are happy to report or commentate on patient involvement, few but growing in number, encourage such new questions to be aired and debated relying only on the evidence that there is a question which informed people are discussing. The aim is that researcher groups will pick up on these ideas and have a reference base, however small, to work with when they seek funding for a full research project.