In her debut blog, Tuba Saygın Avşar summarises a recent RCT, which finds that “E-cigarettes might help women who are pregnant to stop smoking, and their safety for use in pregnancy is similar to that of nicotine patches.”
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In his debut blog, Christian Dalton-Locke reviews a recent longitudinal (online survey) study, which looks at mental health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research finds that women, young adults, those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, and people with pre-existing mental health problems were affected worse than others.
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Ola Demkowicz writes her debut elf blog about a study that evaluates reliable improvement rates in depression and anxiety at the end of treatment in adolescents.
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Thalia Eley and Gerome Breen explore a new systematic meta-review of predictors of antidepressant treatment outcome in depression, which looks at clinical and demographic variables, but also biomarkers including both genetic and neuroimaging data.
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Geoff Davies publishes his debut elf blog about a recent systematic review and meta-analysis looking at age at onset and the outcomes of schizophrenia.
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André Tomlin considers a new article about high integrity mental health services for children, which calls for mental health and wellbeing support to draw on self, families, school and community resources.
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Eleanor Kennedy reports on a nationwide Swedish cohort study, which finds that traumatic brain injury consistently predicted later risk of premature mortality, psychiatric inpatient admission, psychiatric outpatient visits, disability pension, welfare recipiency and low educational attainment.
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This briefing from the NHS Confederation gives a concise outline of the practicalities of outcomes-based commissioning. This is an area which has received a fair bit of attention and whilst there have been a few reports advocating this approach, there has been surprisingly little in the way of detail. The briefing is based on the learning [read the full story…]
This recent report, commissioned by the European Commission and compiled by RAND Europe, aims to summarise economic evaluation evidence on the impact of integrated care. The authors restricted their evidence search to systematic reviews and meta analyses, which is understandable as this is described as a rapid review but the authors acknowledge this has limitations, [read the full story…]
This review from the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics is certainly timely for commissioners in England, with plans for the Better Care Fund well underway and Simon Stevens, the new Chief Executive for NHS England, recently quoted as saying “no-one should pretend just combining two financially leaky buckets will magically create a watertight funding solution” [read the full story…]
