Talking in Primary Care: communication skills e-learning for practitioners

Not Applicable

• Conditions: Musculoskeletal pain and other conditions/symptoms; Not Applicable

• Registration Number: ISRCTN18010240
• Lead Sponsor: niversity of Southampton

Brief Summary

Not available

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2022-09-15
• Last Update Posted: 8 July 2024
• Study Completion: 2024-10-31

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: Ongoing
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 1682

Inclusion Criteria

Practices:
All general practices serving NHS patients in England are eligible. Each hub will work closely with local CRNs to target practices in areas of high deprivation indices and serving patients from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Practices that are part of large multi-practice primary care networks will be eligible but the unit of randomisation will be considered on a case-by-case basis (i.e., randomise as a group or as individual practices). The degree and type of integration and likelihood of contamination between the practices will be considered.

Practitioners:
All practitioners working within participating general practices and seeing people with MSK pain are eligible and will be encouraged to undertake the EMPathicO training; this may include GPs, physiotherapists, practice nurses, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants.

Patients: MSK group:
1. Adult (aged 18+ years)
2. Verbally consulting a participating practitioner about new, recurrent, or ongoing MSK pain (e.g. back, hip, knee, neck pain - consistent with ICD-11’s diseases of the MSK system)
3. Reporting their average pain in the last week as 4 or more on the numerical rating scale from the Brief Pain Inventory at the index consultation (where 0 = no pain; 10 = pain as bad as you can imagine)
4. Consulting face-to-face in surgery, via the telephone, or via videoconference, even if those consultations were initiated via e-consult/email/initial triage call
5. Has capacity to give informed consent

Patients: non-MSK group:
1. Adult (aged 18+ years)
2. Verbally consulting a participating practitioner about something other than MSK pain
3. Has capacity to give informed consent
4. Patients who are consulting for MSK pain and reporting their pain in the last week as less than 4 on the numerical rating scale from the Brief Pain Inventory at the index consultation (where 0 = no pain; 10 = pain as bad as you can imagine)

Exclusion Criteria

Practices:
The 26 practices (18 from Wessex CRN, 5 from the Keele area) that were involved in the intervention development and feasibility work and have already seen and/or used the intervention

Practitioners:
Unwilling to undertake the intervention and the trial procedures

Patients: MSK pain group and non-MSK group:
1. Consulting solely in written forms, e.g., via e-consult/emails (these patients will not be invited into the study)
2. Has pain known to be caused by malignancy
3. Unable to consent
4. Unable to complete questionnaires (for example, because of severe mental illness or distress, terminal illness) (these patients will be screened out pre-invitation by practice staff)
5. Already enrolled in the trial (e.g., if they consulted a participating practitioner twice within the recruitment window)

To support wider access to participation in research and improve sample representatives, people who do not speak or read/write English will not be excluded; instead, an interpreter will be made available to support non-English speakers. If numbers permit, the researchers plan to test for any differences in intervention effectiveness for patients requiring an interpreter during their consultation.

Study & Design

• Study Type: Interventional
• Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
1. Pain intensity measured using the pain intensity subscale from the Brief Pain Inventory at pre-consultation baseline, post-consultation, 1, 3 and 6 months<br>2. Patient enablement measured using the modified Patient Enablement Index at post-consultation, 1, 3 and 6 months