View clinical trials related to Communication.
Filter by:This project is a partnership between Soar Technology, the University of Southern California (USC) Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families (CIR) and the USC Creative Media and Behavioral Health Center (CM&BHC) to conduct a Safety and Effectiveness Study (SES) for an educational role-playing game developed by Soar Technology, Inc. The purpose of the intervention to be delivered by Soar Technology is to educate families and friends with the ultimate goal of empowering them to have a conversation with the veteran/service member about readjustment issues. The study will assess the safety and effectiveness of the provided game using personal interviews, play testing, and surveys. The game playing experience is hypothesized to be safe and effective with respect to having conversations with veterans/service members following deployment.
Background: Adherence to the immunosuppressive drug regimen is critical to the outcome after an organ transplant. Patients need to take their prescribed medications and attend their appointments with the doctor. Based on previous studies in other European countries, the cost of non-compliance after organ transplantation in Sweden is >SEK 35 million/year. Patients who lose their graft both lose quality of life and have decreased expected survival; moreover, retransplantation may be hampered by new HLA antibodies. Question: The primary question is whether Med-O-Wheel™ can improve compliance to the prescribed medication regimen in renal transplant patients. Methods and materials: All kidney transplant patients at Karolinska University Hospital, Huddinge, will be given information about the study and will then be asked to participate. Participants will be randomized into two arms, one arm with and one with out Med-O-Wheel™. The 80 included patients will be closely monitored for 1 year regarding intake of prescribed medications. Med-O-Wheel™ is an electronic medication dispenser that records the date and time of each occasion when the patient takes medications from the dispenser. It has a SIM card and text messaging capabilities. Addoz Portal™ is a web-based application that makes it possible to monitor and analyse medication intake. Each event in the medication dispenser is registered in the portal, which communicates with the care provider/support person by text message, e-mail or telephone. Significance of the study: In the future it may be possible to improve compliance in transplant patients. In particular, patients will feel secure since they will receive confirmation through the portal that they are taking their medications safely and accurately.
The number of persons on the national solid organ waiting list continues to increase while the number of donated organs has failed to keep pace. In some portions of northeastern Ohio the donation rate is as low as 32%. There is a positive association between discussing organ donation with a primary care physician and signing a donor card. However, such discussions are rare. The investigators propose a blinded randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of two interventions: 1) showing a donation video to patients in primary care settings waiting to see their physician and 2) cueing of primary care providers to have donation discussions with their patients. The study will be conducted throughout Cuyahoga County in at least 10 ambulatory clinics associated with a single county medical system. Nine hundred patients over 15.5 years of age will be enrolled. The investigators hypothesize that patients exposed to the interventions will be 1) more likely to consent to donate organs, 2) more likely to have donation discussions with their primary care providers, and 3) equally satisfied with the time spent with their doctor compared to patients who are not exposed to the interventions.
The Danish regions aim to implement antenatal education in small groups for all expectant parents. The effects of general antenatal education for childbirth or parenthood, or both, remain largely unknown. Also it is unknown if antenatal education in small groups is superior to antenatal lectures which is currently standard care. The aim of the trial is to evaluate if antenatal birth and parent preparation in small groups can increase parenting resources thereby easing birth and creating a smoother and less stressful transition to parenthood among the participants, compared to those allocated to standard care. This in turn is hypothesized to improve health and thriving among newborn families and affect their use of healthcare services. A thorough process evaluation will be conducted highlighting enabling factors and barriers to the implementation. Finally cost-effectiveness analysis will be conducted. Individually randomised trial sited at Hvidovre Hospital, a large birth clinic in the Copenhagen Capital Region of Denmark. Participants: 1756 pregnant women ≥ 18 years old, recruited before 20+0 weeks gestation, due to give birth at Hvidovre Hospital. Being legally able and willing to provide signed consent, and being fluent in Danish. Women are randomised to receive: 1. A research-based birth and parenting program. The intervention consists of 4 sessions in small groups that last for 2,5 hours per session at 25, 33 and 35 weeks of gestation, and a post-natal session 5 weeks after expected due date. 2. Standard care (control group). The pregnant woman and her partner are offered two antenatal lectures in an auditorium. The allocation of participants to the intervention will be 1:1 to the intervention and the control group. Data will be collected via questionnaires at baseline, 37 weeks gestation, 9 weeks post-partum, 6 months post-partum and 1 year post-partum, via the hospital obstetric database, and via the national registers. Analyses will be intention to treat. Subgroup analysis will be conducted in relation to personal and demographic characteristics. Process evaluation will be conducted using questionnaires and qualitative interviews. The incremental societal cost of the intervention will be computed and compared to the measured outcomes in a cost-effectiveness analysis. Outcomes: Stress, parenting alliance, depressive symptoms, wellbeing obstetric intervention, use of health care services, self-efficacy, divorce.
Assessing whether structuring of discharge information improves the sender's recall capacity
The purpose of the study is to improve patient-physician communication and clinical decisions in the context of serious illness that may affect important clinical outcomes. The investigators will examine how variations in communication patterns and clinical decisions are affected by patient demographics (e.g age, sex), patient interactional style (e.g. communication behaviors) and physician characteristics (e.g. attitudes, background, training).
An Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator (ICD) is a device implanted in a patient's chest to monitor the heart rhythm and deliver shocks to terminate potentially lethal arrhythmias when necessary. While ICDs reduce sudden cardiac death, patients with ICDs eventually die of heart failure or other diseases. As patients near the end of life, physiologic changes (intrinsic and extrinsic to the heart) may affect the cardiac conduction system, leading to more arrhythmias and increasing the frequency of shocks. Because ICD shocks can cause pain and anxiety and may not prolong a life of acceptable quality, it is appropriate to consider deactivating the shocking function of ICDs as patients' clinical status worsens and death is near. This will be a randomized controlled trial of a physician centered counseling and education intervention to improve clinician-patient communication about the management of ICDs.
Few studies have explored how specific formats of effectiveness information effect on real patients' decisions. We only know little about what kind of format would be the optimal to help patients make well-informed real-life decisions corresponding to their preferences. The trial is developed in a clinical randomised design to study risk communication in the shared decision making between general practitioners (GP) and their patients in primary prevention with of cholesterol lowering drug. Endpoints are effect of GPs' information about treatment effectiveness and their patients' values on patients' tendency to accept and adhere to the treatment as well as their feeling of content with the choice made. GPs are randomised to inform about risk and treatment effectiveness by means of either absolute risk reduction (ARR) or Prolongation of Life (POL). Afterwards patients are invited to answer questionnaires concerning their content with decisions and reflections. Patients' redemption of prescriptions during the following week and the first year are recorded through an electronic database. 57 GPs and 248 patients have been enrolled in the trial.
Background: We want to learn more about the relationship between the way families function and how children adapt to having a sibling with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). What we learn will help us design better interventions for families. Objective: - To learn more about how families with an individual with DMD function. - To learn how siblings adapt in families with an individual with DMD. Eligibility: - One parent and one child, age 13-18, from a family where another child has DMD. - The parent and the child must be able to read and write English. Design: - One parent from each family will complete a survey about how family members communicate and relate with each other. The parent will also answer questions about the behavior of the child without DMD. This survey will take you about 40 minutes to complete. - One child from each family, either a boy or a girl, will also complete a survey. This survey asks about how he/she views him/herself. It also asks about how he/she interacts with peers and family members and how he/she behaves. The survey also asks how satisfied he/she is with how his/her family functions. This survey takes about 30 minutes to finish.
Purpose: -To evaluate the peri-operative communication between families and the pediatric cardiac surgery team. Method: -In this study the investigators plan to utilize structured interview and survey of parents/legal guardians and health care providers of children undergoing cardiac surgery in the United States of America.