Assessing patient, carer and health-care profession education provided by the Birmingham Arthritis Resource Centre (BARC): reply

A. Adebajo1,2, L. Blenkiron3 and P. Dieppe3,4

1 Department of Rheumatology, Barnsley District General Hospital, 2 Academic Rheumatology Group, University of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, 3 Department of Social Medicine and 4 MRC Health Service Research Collaboration, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Correspondence to: A. Adebajo, Department of Rheumatology, Barnsley District General Hospital, South Yorkshire S75 2EP, UK. E-mail: a.o.adebajo{at}sheffield.ac.uk

We thank Treharne and colleagues for their interest in our editorial [1] on patient education.

We commend their efforts to assess the impact of their interventions. Whilst we recognize that educational interventions can be very difficult to evaluate, we feel that doing so is important, particularly in the light of limited budgets and the need to demonstrate clinical and cost effectiveness.

We wish once again to emphasize the benefits of a mixed methodology approach, as is being carried out by the Birmingham group. Combining qualitative and quantitative studies in this way provides, in our view, much richer information. Furthermore, it enables targeting and delivery of educational interventions at both a population as well as an individual level.

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest.

References

  1. Adebajo A, Blenkiron L, Dieppe P. Patient education for diverse populations. Rheumatology 2004; in press.
Accepted 27 August 2004





This Article
Full Text (PDF)
Alert me when this article is cited
Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Email this article to a friend
Similar articles in this journal
Similar articles in PubMed
Alert me to new issues of the journal
Add to My Personal Archive
Download to citation manager
Disclaimer
Request Permissions
Google Scholar
Articles by Adebajo, A.
Articles by Dieppe, P.
PubMed
PubMed Citation
Articles by Adebajo, A.
Articles by Dieppe, P.
Related Collections
Other Rheumatology