Shauna McKibben

Feasibility and impact of implementing electronic flagging alerts of bronchodilator overuse in primary care

People with asthma who rely on their bronchodilator (quick reliever) and not the preventive inhaler, which tackles the root cause of asthma often have poor control of their disease. Many studies confirm that they are at increased risk of asthma attacks, hospital admission and even death. Expert reviews have shown that many people who died from asthma had not only received many bronchodilator inhalers (often more than 20 inhalers/year) from their GP but also had not been invited to, or had not attended, an asthma review to discuss their inhaler use and asthma control.

Current GP computer prescribing systems do not effectively flag up overuse of bronchodilator inhalers. An effective flagging system is urgently needed to identify and target such people at high risk of asthma attacks by triggering an invitation to a review.

This PhD takes forward our work on bronchodilator overuse: the researcher will start by interviewing asthma experts (including people with asthma) and general practice teams to identify the important features of a flagging system that general practices will use, and how they will respond to the alerts. They will then work with EMIS (the UK’s leading provider of GP software) to develop such a system. They will pilot its implementation in four general practices, examining how practices use the system and whether it effectively triggers effective asthma reviews, to determine whether we can measure the impact of the flagging system in a larger, definitive study.

About me

My research interests are asthma control and management, qualitative research, primary and secondary care.

Publications

Noble, H & McKibben, S 2014, ‘AKI hits the headlines: let’s blame the nurses..’ British Journal of Nursing, vol 23, no. 9, pp. 452. https://doi.org/10.12968/bjon.2014.23.9.452

Acknowledgements

Funded by Queen Mary University of London