WIME: Developing and Evaluating Interventions to Reduce Inappropriate Prescribing of Antibiotics in Primary Care.

Date:

2010-2012

Themes:

Web Science, Knowledge Technologies, Virtual Communities and Social Systems, Healthcare in ECS, Interaction with Knowledge and semantics

Funding:

Chief Scientist Office (Scotland) (CZH/4/610)

Intervention modelling experiments (IMEs) allow complex interventions to be explored and refined prior to a full-scale trial by delivering key elements of the intervention in a simulation that approximates clinical practice. The current proposal will build on previous CSO-funded work and run a full, web-based IME (WIME) that will advance the methodology of IMEs by directly comparing results with an earlier paper-based IME.

The WIME will be targeted at inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics in primary care. It will systematically develop and evaluate theory-based interventions that correspond to the theoretical, modelling and experimental phases of the MRC Framework. We will compare predictors of GP behaviour obtained from the WIME with those obtained in the paper-based IME and put one of the earlier IME’s interventions into the WIME and compare it, in an experimental design, with a new intervention developed specifically for web-based delivery. We propose to put the most successful intervention forward into a separately funded full-scale trial.

Primary investigator

• Dr Shaun TreWeek (University of Dundee)

Secondary investigators

• Professor Ian Ricketts (University of Dundee)
• Dr Jillian Francis (University of Aberdeen)
• Professor Martin Eccles (University of Newcastle)
• Dr Debbie Bonetti (University of Dundee)
• Professor Nigel Pitts (University of Dundee)
• Dr Graeme MacLennan (University of Aberdeen)
• Professor Frank Sullivan (University of Dundee)
• Mark Weal

Associated research groups

• Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
• Learning Societies Lab