A PhD student and qualified physiotherapist has already been published in the British Medical Journal for her work on hospital-acquired deconditioning – an important illness requiring rehabilitation.
Dr Meri Westlake, whose PhD was supported through NRC funding, studied at the University of Nottingham where she investigated how healthcare professionals recognise and respond to hospital-acquired deconditioning (HAD).
Her qualitative exploration highlighted that the key features that were recognised as HAD depended upon the characteristics of the recogniser, the patient’s journey and organisational constraints, and broader socio-economic changes. Dr Westlake found that these aspects interact with each other to produce highly contextualised and individualised clinical decisions.
A subsequent consensus study confirmed that agreement on diagnostic criteria for HAD remains elusive, and this uncertainty creates challenges in determining when a patient's condition stems from their initial illness versus their hospitalisation itself, making it difficult to evaluate potential improvements in care.
Overall, the findings illustrated that HAD functions as a clinical term with uncertain grounding, leading to differing interpretations across multidisciplinary teams and occasional frustration.
You can read the publication here: 'Towards a common definition of hospital-acquired deconditioning in adults: A scoping review'