EULAR Abstract Awards for Health Professionals
The abstract Development of user-focused standards of care for rheumatoid arthritis relating to the work that has been done in Vienna for workpackage 5 won a EULAR Abstract Awards for Health Professionals at the EULAR Congress 2012. The purpose of Work package 5, as a part of the eumusc.net project, was to develop evidence based and user-focused standards of care (SOC), for Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA).
To achieve this a systematic review of international documents covering Standards of Care for RA was conducted. National scientific societies, social leagues and health professional associations were contacted via the EULAR secretariat and asked to provide relevant documents. Documents concerning pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions published after 2002 were included.
The obtained documents were evaluated based on the AGREE II criteria (www.agreetrust.org). All recommended methods to treat RA were extracted, as well as information on them and all recommendations given. Each of these methods was discussed in a consensus group meeting of 21 eumusc.net researchers and patient representatives from different countries regarding priority and relevance in their home countries as well as possible interrelation with other methods. A scheme was developed with groups of interventions and formulated in a way that could be understood by users. To this end, conventional DMARDs, biological agents, NSAIDs, were grouped under pharmacological treatment. Giving up smoking, weight control and physical activity were grouped under Lifestyle Interventions.
49 types of therapies or other interventions, such as DMARDs, biological agents, exercise and activity based interventions were extracted from the documents and could be grouped into seven types of interventions, namely: Pharmacological Treatment, Monitoring, Lifestyle Interventions, Surgery, Education/ Information/ Self Management, Non- Pharmacological Treatment and Access to care. From these data 16 user-focused standards of care were formulated.
Author of the abstract is Michaela Stoffer, who was the researcher at Medizinische Universität Wien in Austria for Workpackage 5. On the third day of the congress Michaela presented her abstract for a room of about 150 people. They all received the Standards of Care for both OA and RA.
Michaela: It is nice that I won the prize but it is a prize that eumusc.net has received. It is a price for all the people that have contributed to the project and all the hours of work that have been put in.
Michaela: It is nice that I won the prize but it is a prize that eumusc.net has received. It is a price for all the people that have contributed to the project and all the hours of work that have been put in.
Professor Anthony Woolf and Michaella Stoffer at the eumusc.net stand Eular Village 2012 Berlin
You can download your own copy of the Standards of Care here.
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