My experience at ESPACOMP 2017
Caroline Katzer, PhD Student based at University College London
The European Society for Patient Adherence, Compliance and Persistence (ESPACOMP) held their annual meeting in the beautiful city of Budapest in early December last year. Four of our AUKCAR group from University College London were present, accompanied by the head of our research group, Professor Rob Horne, and we disseminated our work in a total of three oral and three poster presentations.
The first researcher to present was AUKCAR-affiliated PhD student Marissa Mes, with her systematic review results highlighting the effectiveness of pharmacist-led interventions in increasing adherence to preventive medication in adults with asthma. Pharmacist-led (or pharmacy technician-led) advice was of great interest at ESPACOMP and discussed in various presentations from different European countries, hence Marissa’s presentation attracted large interest amongst attendees.
The session was followed by the poster viewing during the lunch break. AUKCAR-funded PhD student Christina Pearce and research associate Dr Amy Chan used the opportunity to disseminate their respective research. Christina presented two posters on her research with children with severe asthma; one outlining the results of her study on nonadherence patterns and the second one showing her insights from qualitative interviews exploring factors influencing nonadherence in this particular group. Dr Amy Chan presented her poster on a systematic review looking into the perceptions of mobile mental health apps, work inspired by her previous post as a clinical pharmacist in mental health in New Zealand.
On the next day, with an early start following the conference dinner, Dr Amy Chan and I finally presented our work to the audience in Budapest. Amy’s talk dealt with the information need of people in inpatient mental health services; an interview study from her time at the University of Auckland. I presented the insights arising from my focus group study with adults with asthma. I outlined the complexity of adherence behaviour and the need to take interactions between practical factors, contextual factors in the health care system and patient perceptions into account when designing individualised adherence interventions. The incorporation of these findings into novel interventions was of great interest to the audience, which included many clinicians and pharmacists.
Apart from disseminating our own work, ESPACOMP provided a great opportunity to meet leading researchers in the adherence field and exchange ideas with fellow researchers. Oral presentation sessions covered quantitative and qualitative studies on determinants of adherence, measurements of adherence outcomes and methods, and interventions, including systematic reviews to inform interventions. Many innovative approaches in the adherence research field were presented, including the measuring of adherence to medication through machine learning, the potential of increasing health information recall by using animations and a narrative communication style, and specifically in asthma and COPD, the usage of a custom electronic monitoring device called the INCATM to assess adherence which is predictive of health outcomes.
ESPACOMP filled us with plenty of ideas and motivation for our own research, and we are all looking forward to attending again in the future.