Now that's what I call blogging 2021

Posted by Mark Welford, Fuse Communications Manager, Teesside University

Let’s all channel British novelist E.M. Forster and play a little game of Only Connect. What connects the things below?

“Yes of course, they can all be a type of list” (said in the friendly yet ever so slightly patronising manner of host Victoria Coren Mitchell)

I think it's fair to say that we all love a list. I mean, the premise of another very popular BBC gameshow is basically to list pointless stuff.

So here again (a little later than advertised) is our annual list of the most-viewed Fuse blog posts of 2021!

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this would be dominated by Covid and the pandemic as we saw in the 2020 list.

Obviously, we had our fair share of pandemic related posts. Blogs about misinformation, food insecurity, malnutrition, obesity and what children made of it all. How it impacted on work and engagement with public partners, parents, decisionmakers, practitioners, policy-makers and commissioners. How it affected our mental health, our liberties and even inspired a song and a cat-scale of wellbeing!

But as you can see from the list below it didn't dominate the top 5 chart-toppers of 2021. Perhaps a little escapism goes along way...

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Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

5. The other third wave: a mass epidemic of very individual pain

Posted by Jack Nicholls, Lecturer in Social Work at Northumbria University

Lockdown restrictions were beginning to ease in the UK. But after the jubilation, what if you don't feel the way you think you should?

A very personal post by Jack Nicholls on the long-term mental health consequences of the pandemic, of lockdown and social restrictions, and of its easing. 

*Content/trigger warning: mental health, depression, suicidal feelings.

Page views: 938

Published: 16 April 2021.

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4. Patient and Public involvement with Parents during a Pandemic: the four ‘P’ challenge

Posted by Hannah Batten, Food and Human Nutrition undergraduate student at Newcastle University. Hannah was on a placement year with the Population Health Sciences Institute, as part of the MapMe study aiming to help parents assess child weight.

Body image scales on the MapMe website are being updated for MapMe2

"Most importantly, is to say to our participants that we are extremely grateful for their time and input, particularly during these uncertain times."

Hannah tells us how she and the MapMe study team met the challenges involved in recruiting and running an online Parent Involvement Panel (PIP) to help review documents and study materials, when parents were already dealing with a global pandemic. 

Page views: 1,029

Published: 5 March 2021.

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3. Should pregnancy 'be incentive enough' to quit smoking?

Posted by Susan Jones, Research Associate at Teesside University

In this blog post on #NoSmokingDay, Dr Jones explored deprivation, guilt, shame, stigma and the complex web of reasons behind smoking behaviour.

Just searched #smoking #pregnancy #incentives - struck by many tweets that say 'pregnancy should be incentive enough' to quit smoking. Clearly the stats tell a different story for a significant minority - the question surely is why and what can be done? @ASH_LDN @FreshSmokeFree

— Dr Susan Jones (@Susan_E_Jones) December 10, 2020

Page views: 1,155
Published: 10 March 2021.

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2. Things I wish I’d known when I started my PhD… (part 1)

Posted by members of the Population Health Interventions Programme at the MRC Epidemiology Unit

Research doesn't happen overnight, avoid comparison and channel your inner Arsène Wenger ("Le Professeur"). In our second most popular blog post, the early, mid and senior career researchers at University of Cambridge share their tips for PhD survival.

Here is part 2 which interestingly received only half as many views despite including a High School Musical reference.

Page views: 1,347

Published: 4 June 2021.

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1. Can Forest School inspire the next generation to be happy & healthy?

Posted by Katie Beresford, undergraduate student at Durham University

With more than 2,700 views this is our most read post of 2021 by some distance!

In it Katie explores growing up in the Lake District, embracing nature, finding school restrictive and struggling academically in her early years.

Nearly two decades later she is completing a Fuse summer internship with the NIHR School for Public Health Research and is tasked to review literature discussing the effectiveness of Forest School as a public health intervention.

Why not grab a coffee and take a walk with Katie into the woods to find out what she discovered...

Page views: 2,746

Published: 8 October 2021.

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So there you have it, the top five Fuse blog posts of 2021. Congratulations to Katie who wins a rare and coveted Fuse paperweight!  

Fantastically both Katie and Hannah's blog posts were part of our Fuse blog Student Series which we launched last year! This showcases posts by students who have been challenged to write a blog as part of their studies. The authors may be new to blogging and we hope to provide a 'safe space' for the students to explore their subject and find their voice in the world of public health research. Hopefully this will encourage other students to take the plunge!

As always, many thanks to our loyal readers and fantastic contributors.

Can we do any better in 2022? If you fancy giving it a go, please find out what we are looking for and how to take part here. All contributors receive a much sought-after Fuse badge.

Images:

2. Image: Katsushika Hokusai, (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons

4. Mr. Alexander Ottesen, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

The challenges (and joys) of evaluating babyClear©: a package of support to help pregnant women to stop smoking

Guest post by Sue Jones, Research Associate, Teesside University

A team of Fuse researchers from Newcastle and Teesside Universities published findings from the babyClear© study a few weeks ago and I thought that I’d put finger to keyboard to share with you the challenges and joys of evaluating the roll out of this innovative intervention.

In 2012, I became involved with evaluating babyClear©, a package of support for maternity and stop smoking services, designed to help them to deliver the stop smoking message more effectively to pregnant women. BabyClear© was due to be rolled out regionally across North East England and evaluated throughout, which presented a number of challenges:

• Challenge 1: different research questions – we wanted to know if this new approach worked and would it help women quit but we knew that this would not be enough; we wanted to understand what influenced those figures, and what healthcare staff need to do to be most effective.
• Challenge 2: ethical dilemma – ethically we could not deny pregnant women a test like carbon monoxide monitoring that was known to improve outcomes to some degree, so the regional rollout of babyClear© offered a prime opportunity to evaluate the intervention using a natural experiment1.
• Challenge 3: wide variety of stop smoking delivery models – the extent of austerity measures experienced by the public sector has been far greater than anticipated when the research was envisaged in 2011. At the same time responsibility for delivery of stop smoking services has been moved to local authorities who themselves are under extreme pressure to reduce spending. This has created a wide variety of stop smoking delivery models, all trying to provide a low cost service but with implications for the implementation. For example: babyClear© was designed to be a package that could easily slot into existing services, however it assumed a number of systems were standard when they were not, such as a midwife available at dating scan appointments and a local stop smoking specialist in pregnancy. All those Heinz 57 varieties of stop smoking service delivery models and systems within maternity services, each one different from every other, made it logistically challenging to implement the new pathway, leading to delays of varying lengths in each Trust area.
• Challenge 4: researching within a changing system – due to ongoing changes largely in the delivery of stop smoking services, but also in maternity, and their impact on the implementation of babyClear©, data collection plans had to be re-thought again ... and again ... and again to reflect what was happening out in the real world! 

We were greatly helped in approaching some of these challenges by the publication in 2014 of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Guidance on process evaluation of complex interventions. Using this guidance, we were able to start re-shaping our thinking in terms of how the qualitative data could be used synergistically with the numerical data. We set about strengthening the methodology with a retrospective logic model, weaving contextual data into the mix and with an eye on the mechanisms of impact.

After overcoming these challenges, along came the joys: the findings of our study proved that babyClear© was not only effective but also cost-effective, which was a great achievement in such a short timescale. This new approach, which supported midwives to offer universal carbon monoxide screening and refer pregnant smokers quickly to expert help, nearly doubled quit rates.

The findings highlighted that we could systematically help women to stop smoking in pregnancy which will result in already well-evidenced outcomes such as:

• Help mothers have babies who are heavier and healthier than if they continued smoking
• Help more mothers lead healthier lives
• Help mothers live longer and see their children grow up
• Help the children to live and run and grow up surrounded by smoke free air; and 
• Enable them to not be held back by smoking-related poor health

So have a read of our paper, this has the nitty-gritty of the statistical outcomes.

Importantly, soon we hope to be publishing the details about the how, what, when, where, why questions that were the focus of the qualitative process evaluation. Without this it is difficult to know how to implement it elsewhere to best effect and why it works well in one place and not another.

Celebrate our findings with us; if the maternity and stop smoking services are able to use the babyClear© approach to implement best practice/national guidance it can offer the support that is needed so that more women stop smoking during their pregnancy than did before. So keep your eyes peeled for my next blog – which will focus on the findings from the process evaluation.


Reference:

1. “A natural experiment is an empirical study in which individuals (or clusters of individuals) exposed to the experimental and control conditions are determined by nature or by other factors outside the control of the investigators, yet the process governing the exposures arguably resembles random assignment”. (Reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/natural_experiment)     More info: Craig P, Cooper C, Gunnell D, Haw S, Lawson K, Macintyre S, Ogilvie D, Petticrew M, Reeves B, Sutton M, Thompson S. Using natural experiments to evaluate population health interventions: new Medical Research Council guidance. J epidemiol commun h. 2012 May 10:jech-2011.

Related content:

• News story: Scheme’s success at stopping mums-to-be smoking
• Video courtesy of Fresh - Smoke Free North East, the region’s dedicated tobacco control office