The pilot trial started in July 2019 and will run until July 2020.

Our new paper has been published in HRB Open research. We examined uptake in an Irish primary care population during the initial phase of implementation of RetinaScreen and investigated factors which predict consenting to participate in the programme. 

Susan Ahern joined the IDEAs study as a research a health economist in August 2019.

Congratulations to Emmy Racine who won the best poster prize at the annual sphere network conference today. 

The study, led by Dr Sheena McHugh, was launched on 21st June, 2018 at the School of Public Health, University College Cork. 

Well done to Emmy Racine, who was one of the rapid fire presentatation winners at the Society for Social Medicine and International Epidemiology Association Joint Meeting hosted by the School of Public Health, University College Cork, earlier this week.

Emmy Racine and members of the IDEAs PPI group have started recording a new podcast on their experiences of taking part in research.  The project is funded by the Irish Research Council New Foundations award. Watch this space...more information coming soon!

A special event was held in the School of Public Health, UCC on Monday, 9^th December to launch the LIVE podcast.

LIVE, which stands for ‘LIstening to the Voice of Experience’ is a two-part podcast series about Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in research.

Part I hears from the individuals involved in the IDEAs study. These individuals speak about their lived experience of diabetes and how they are using their experiences to inform and shape the research being conducted.

Speakers at the event included Ms Emmy Racine, PPI coordinator at the School of Public Health, Ms Dawn Steacy, PPI contributor and Dr Martin Galvin, UCC Civic and Community Engagement Officer.

Ms Emmy Racine presented her work on developing a podcast about PPI at the annual SPHeRE conference which took place at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on 25^th February.

Dr Fiona Riordan and Ms Susan Ahern both presented preliminary results of the IDEAS pilot trial at the Association of University Departments of General Practice in Ireland (AUDGPI) Irish College of General Practitioners (IGCP) Joint Scientific Meeting which was held in UCC on the 5^th and 6^th of March.  

The protocol for the IDEAs trial has been published in Pilot and Feasibility Studies. 

The IDEAs intervention development paper has been published in Implementation Science.

Ms Dara O’Keeffe, who is currently a medical student in UCC, presented at the UCC New Horizons conference. Dara presented her dissertation work which was completed as part of a Master of Public Health. 

Lauren O Mahony who is in her final year of the BSc Public Health Sciences, was a recipient of the HRB Summer Studentship Award (2020).

The paper reports the findings of a Study Within a Trial (SWAT) conducted as part of the IDEAs study, specifically as part of the consensus group meetings carried out with people with diabetes and health care professionals.

The paper outlines how we retrospectively costed the development of the IDEAs intervention, a multifaceted intervention in primary care to improve attendance at diabetic retinopathy screening. 

The PhD candidate will join a team led by Sheena McHugh, investigating the process and impact of tailoring implementation strategies to support evidence-based interventions for a range of clinical conditions and health service settings.

More information on the project is available here.

To apply for the scholarship click here.

The research note outlines the acceptability and feasibility of study procedures used as part of the IDEAs cluster randomised pilot trial of an intervention in primary care to improve uptake of Ireland’s national diabetic retinopathy programme. 

The article, published in the December issue of FORUM, outlines how we conducted a pilot randomised controlled trial to evaluate the feasibility and cost of delivering an intervention in general practice to improve diabetic retinopathy screening attendance.

The paper outlines how we investigated the feasibility and preliminary effects of an intervention to improve uptake of Ireland’s national diabetic retinopathy programme, Diabetic RetinaScreen, among patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

The article, published in the Autumn issue of Diabetes Ireland, outlines the importance of attending diabetes eye screening, and how we developed and tested an intervention to improve screening attendance.

The PPI Ignite Network have shared a number of case studies from across the Network, as examples of different PPI approaches, across a broad range of research topics and methods.