Research on Research

Trauma remains a major cause of mortality and morbidity. 10% of blunt force trauma patients admitted to a major trauma centre will have sustained one or more fractured ribs, which may cause significant pain and problems with breathing.

To establish the outcome of rib fractures and their treatments it is important to know what to measure, and how to measure this accurately. A patient reported outcome measure (PROM) is a questionnaire used to measure patient reported outcomes, to show how the patient is doing from their perspective.

Whilst there is ongoing interest in surgery to fix broken ribs, there is no PROM specifically designed for patients with broken ribs following chest trauma. Therefore, it is not clear whether the symptoms that are most important to these patients are being represented by the current outcome measures. This study aims to create a PROM specific to rib fracture patients to give us a better understanding of whether a new treatment actually makes a difference to the patient’s recovery.

The 1st part of the study involves asking patients with rib fractures to help design a new PROM. This will be conducted through focus groups at a site in Nottingham. The 2nd part of the study entails field testing, whereby patients with rib fractures will be asked to test this new PROM. This will be conducted across multiple secondary care settings in the UK, including the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. The study is expected to run for approximately 2 years, with recruitment targets of 50 patients for the PROM Creation phase and 250 for the Field Testing phase.

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Diagnostics devices play an important part in the clinical assessment of a patient’s health and treatment. The purpose of the study is the evaluation of a new diagnostic platform developed by LumiraDx. The evaluation is focused around various biomarkers useful in the emergency settings.

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