Louise Locock
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 111692 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Louise Locock |
| NOMBRES | Louise |
| APELLIDO | Locock |
| FIRMA | LOCOCK L |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Aberdeen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8109-1930 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 311 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
‘It Was a Bit of a Now or Never Situation’
INTRODUCTION: One in five women enters pregnancy with multiple long-term health conditions, which is associated with increased risks of adverse maternal and child outcomes. There is a lack of research exploring individuals' experiences of preconception care for these women, which is also reflected in existing guidelines that predominantly focus on single health conditions. This study aimed to explore experiences of preconception care and support …
Mapping the benefits and harms of antenatal and newborn screening programmes
Health screening is undergoing seismic change that includes the potential forpersonalized medicine, big data, whole genome sequencing, artificial intelligence and the development of novel and experimental therapies. Acceptability research typically gathers cross-sectional data that identifies and characterizes the harms and benefits of screening programmes, as well as the ways they are experienced, weighed and valued by different groups. Efforts …
‘A little bit of support really, that's all I was looking for’ a qualitative study of the biographical disruption of fibromyalgia at work in the UK
Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition which can have a detrimental impact on a person’s interaction with work. Biographical disruption is a lens through which people’s experiences of many chronic conditions have been described. We applied this lens to experiences of work amongst people with fibromyalgia to better understand what support they required to continue to work. We conducted semi-structured interviews in 2019/20 with 31 people who have fib…
Co‐Design of the Structured Personalised Assessment for Reviews After Cancer (SPARC) Intervention
INTRODUCTION: An increasing number of people are living beyond cancer with unmet health needs. The aim of this study was to co-design a digital intervention to improve health outcomes for people who have completed potentially curative treatment for cancer. METHODS: Two co-design workshops were held with patients, clinicians (including oncologists, general practitioners and nurses), digital/computing science experts and third-sector representative…
Involvement of older adults in shared decision-making on care transitions in the UK
The global population is ageing rapidly, emphasising the need to understand the decision-making processes of older adults regarding potential care transitions. Gerontological research has focused on healthcare decisions, with less information on living situation choices of older adults. This review explored older adults' experiences with their involvement in decision-making processes related to transitioning into care facilities in the United Kin…
Chronicity rhetoric in health and welfare systems inhibits patient recovery
Fibromyalgia is a leading cause of disability in the UK and worldwide, but is difficult to diagnose and treat due to unclear pathogenesis and diverse and fluctuating symptoms. Although various treatment modalities are recommended, no treatments have been proven to effect sustainable improvement or recovery, and patients are typically dissatisfied with their care. Increasingly, biopsychosocial services are being developed, that aim to take a multi…
Lost in the System
INTRODUCTION: Over a fifth of pregnant women are living with multiple long-term health conditions, which is associated with increased risks of adverse outcomes for mothers and infants. While there are many examples of research exploring individuals' experiences and care pathways for pregnancy with a single health condition, evidence relating to multiple health conditions is limited. This study aimed to explore experiences and care of women with m…
Fluctuating salience in those living with genetic risk of motor neuron disease
BACKGROUND: Motor neuron disease (MND) (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is a life-limiting neurodegenerative condition. In up to 20% of people with MND, a pathogenic variant associated with autosomal dominant inheritance can be identified. Children of people carrying a pathogenic variant have a 50% chance of inheriting this and a higher, although harder to predict, chance of developing the disease compared to the general adult popula…
Hybrid funerals
Livestreaming and filming death rites and funeral ceremonies to enable remote engagement proliferated rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many expect these options to remain prevalent going forward. This paper draws on interviews with a diverse UK sample of 68 bereaved people, funeral directors, officiants and celebrants. It illustrates how, and explains why, people’s experiences and evaluations of hybrid funerals can vary. In a context whe…
Why does funeral attendance matter? Revisiting ‘configurational eulogies’ in light of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK
This paper uses disruption to norms of funeral attendance experienced in the UK during the COVID−19 pandemic as a lens to illuminate why and how funeral attendance can matter. It draws on an extensive qualitative dataset, gathered through semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 68 individuals who were bereaved and/or worked or volunteered in death care during the COVID−19 pandemic. It first examines interviewees’ concerns about the in…
Rurality, healthcare and crises
Moving to the countryside and staying’? Exploring doctors’ migration choices to rural areas
Young adults' experiences of biographical retrogression whilst living with long Covid
During the early years (2020-2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic, relatively little attention focused on experiences of people with long-lasting symptoms, particularly young adults who were commonly understood to be invulnerable to serious effects of the virus. Drawing on narrative interviews with 15 adults in their twenties and living in the UK when they became ill with long COVID, we explore contextual factors which made their long COVID illness exp…
Negotiation of collective and individual candidacy for long Covid healthcare in the early phases of the Covid-19 pandemic
This analysis of people's accounts of establishing their need and experiences of healthcare for long Covid (LC) symptoms draws on interview data from five countries (UK, US, Netherlands, Canada, Australia) during the first ∼18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic when LC was an emerging, sometimes contested, condition with scant scientific or lay knowledge to guide patients and professionals in their sense-making of often bewildering constellations of…
Is bureaucracy being busted in research ethics and governance for health services research in the UK? Experiences and perspectives reported by stakeholders through an online survey
Consultation with those involved in Health Services Research in the UK revealed a picture of overwhelming and increasing bureaucracy, delays, costs and demoralisation related to gaining the approvals necessary to conduct research in the NHS. Suggestions for improvement across all three areas focused on reducing duplication and unnecessary paperwork/form filling and reaching a better balance between risks of harm through research and harms which o…
‘Language has been granted too much power’. 1,p.1 Challenging the power of words with time and flexibility in the precommencement stage of research involving those with cognitive impairment
The Baby Box scheme in Scotland
BACKGROUND: The Scottish Government introduced a free Baby Box scheme for all new parents in 2017, modelled on the Finnish scheme, to give every baby 'an equal start in life'. There is little evidence that it results in better health outcomes, but there has been limited research into different perspectives and discourses on such schemes. METHODS: Four focus groups were conducted with 21 parents in North-East Scotland. Recordings were transcribed …
Practising in a pandemic
This article presents reflections on the lessons learnt from developing and initiating a rapid research project in 4 weeks during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article highlights the importance of selecting methods appropriate to rapid research, discusses the challenges of data collection in a shifting context, and the importance of the research team being prepared to cede some degree of control over the data collection process. To…
Understanding recruitment and retention of doctors in rural Scotland
Recruitment and retention of medical practitioners is a challenging contemporary policy issue for rural areas. In this paper we explore this issue in the context of doctors in rural and remote Scotland, drawing on findings from a service mapping exercise into the recruitment and retention of doctors in rural areas, conducted by interviewing key stakeholders in the delivery of healthcare in rural and remote Scotland, most of whom combine clinical …
Life ‘on high alert’
It is estimated that up to ten per cent of people with motor neurone disease (MND) have an inherited form of the disease. Families with a history of inherited MND may face specific issues around managing the condition in relatives and adapting to life knowing that they too could develop the disease, which we refer to as living ‘at risk’. This qualitative study is based on a thematic analysis of posts from 37 threads shared on the MND Association …
You Probably Won't Notice Any Symptoms
Pregnancy is not a disease or illness, but requires clinical surveillance as life-threatening complications can develop. Preeclampsia, one such potentially serious complication, puts both mother and baby at risk. Self-monitoring blood pressure in the general population is well established, and its potential in pregnancy is currently being explored. In the context of self-monitoring, the information and guidance given to women regarding hypertensi…
Caring for care
Absorbing it all
In a context of increasing international dialogue around the appropriate means and ends of newborn screening programmes, it is critical to explore the perspectives of those directly impacted by such screening. This meta-ethnography uses a systematic review process to identify qualitative studies that focus on parents' experiences of newborn screening published in English-language academic journals from 2000 to 2019 (n = 36). The included studies …
Team ethnography visual maps
Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethno…
Wild data
Patient-centred care has become the touchstone of healthcare policy in developed healthcare systems. The ensuing commodification of patients' experiences has resulted in a mass of data but little sense of whether and how such data are used. We sought to understand how front-line staff use patient experience data for quality improvement in the National Health Service (NHS). We conducted a 12-month ethnographic case study evaluation of improvement …
Biographical disruption, abruption and repair in the context of Motor Neurone Disease
Concepts of biographical disruption and repair have been widely applied to chronic illness, but not terminal illness. This paper examines the relevance of these concepts to motor neurone disease (MND), a progressive neurological condition characterised by loss of mobility, speech and ability to breathe or swallow. Survival is usually between two and five years, and some die within a few months. The condition thus lies at the boundary between chro…
I knew before I was told
Being differently the same
Just a bystander'? Men's place in the process of fetal screening and diagnosis
Personal identity and the role of 'carer' among relatives and friends of people with multiple sclerosis
Informal caregiving continues to be a crucial part of health and social care provision in the developed world, but the processes by which the identity of informal caregiver is conferred, or assumed, remain unclear. In this article we draw on data from a qualitative research study which examined the experiences of family members and friends of people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) to explore how they interpret the label 'carer'. We conducted narra…
All in the same boat'? Patient and carer attitudes to peer support and social comparison in Motor Neurone Disease (MND)
Understanding the role of opinion leaders in improving clinical effectiveness
The Effect of Joint Interviewing on the Performance of Gender
The authors report a series of controlled comparisons of fifty-eight one-to-one qualitative interviews and thirty-seven mixed-sex joint interviews on the same health-related topics. Their analysis identifies comparative keyword frequencies and is supported by qualitative investigations of keywords in context, drawing on existing relevant knowledge of common gender differences in language choice. Gender differences are reduced and women's perspect…
Biographical value
Illness narratives play a central role in social studies of health and illness, serving as both a key theoretical focus and a popular research method. Despite this, relatively little work has gone into conceptualising how and why illness narratives - be they in books, websites, television or other media - are commodified in contemporary healthcare and its social environment; namely, how distinctive forms of value are generated in the production, …
Evidence-Based Medicine and the Implementation Gap
Evidence-based medicine was one of the earliest manifestations of evidence-based policy and practice, and has exercised substantial influence on other policy areas. Based on data from seven empirical studies carried out between 1993 and 1999, this article examines the origins and impact of EBM, and the complexities of implementation which have emerged. Policy makers and EBM enthusiasts alike have frequently taken a somewhat simplistic view of the…
Making it All Normal
Women are actively encouraged to educate themselves about pregnancy from formal sources (e.g., information leaflets, antenatal classes, books). In addition, informal stories of pregnancy and birth are routinely told between women. However, increased prenatal testing means that more fetuses are diagnosed with abnormalities, shifting the information requirements during pregnancy. Traditional sources of information cannot cover all possible outcomes…
Research, Policy and Practice – Worlds Apart
The relationship between research, policy and practice remains a contested area. This article explores pressures for researchers to make their work more useful and relevant to policy and practice, and for practitioners to undertake research. Whilst there are clearly areas of mutual interest and benefit, we argue that the research, policy and practice communities also have distinct traditions, skills and obligations which should be recognised and …
Drawing straight lines along blurred boundaries
Biomedical research policy in many countries has adopted the principle of active involvement in research. However, how different approaches to involvement such as patient and public involvement/engagement (PPIE), qualitative research, participatory research, co-design and co-production sit alongside each other, is contentious and unclear. There has also been a subtle shift in the discourse, with the language of co-design and co-production used mo…
Wild data
Patient-centred care has become the touchstone of healthcare policy in developed healthcare systems. The ensuing commodification of patients' experiences has resulted in a mass of data but little sense of whether and how such data are used. We sought to understand how front-line staff use patient experience data for quality improvement in the National Health Service (NHS). We conducted a 12-month ethnographic case study evaluation of improvement …
Caring for care
Making Sense of an Unknown Terrain
Self-harm is common in young people, and can have profound effects on parents and other family members. We conducted narrative interviews with 41 parents and other family members of 38 young people, aged up to 25, who had self-harmed. Most of the participants were parents but included one sibling and one spouse. This article reports experiences of the parent participants. A cross-case thematic analysis showed that most participants were bewildere…
Renewing Policy to Support Evidence‐based Health Care
Health systems internationally have developed policies to support evidence‐based health care (EBHC) for over a decade. As this article shows, the time is ripe to review current policy frameworks in an evidence‐based manner. We summarize key themes deriving from qualitative research on the UK EBHC implementation and draw out implications for policy renewal. Our diagnosis is different from current UK NHS (National Health Service) policy since we st…
Understanding recruitment and retention of doctors in rural Scotland
Recruitment and retention of medical practitioners is a challenging contemporary policy issue for rural areas. In this paper we explore this issue in the context of doctors in rural and remote Scotland, drawing on findings from a service mapping exercise into the recruitment and retention of doctors in rural areas, conducted by interviewing key stakeholders in the delivery of healthcare in rural and remote Scotland, most of whom combine clinical …
Team ethnography visual maps
Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethno…
The Changing Nature of Rationing in the UK National Health Service
This paper presents findings from empirical research exploring recent developments in healthcare rationing in the UK, and how far these were influenced by the National Health Service (NHS) internal market. Results suggest explicit rationing has continued to spread, but the focus has shifted from exclusions of whole treatments from NHS provision towards a reconciliation of implicit and explicit approaches. There is growing interest in explicit cri…
Regional Offices in the New NHS
This article reports on a two‐year, multi‐method, qualitative study in two regional offices in the UK National Health Service of the changing role of the regional tier from the autumn of 1994. The nature of the changes from fourteen semiautonomous regional health authorities to eight regional offices of the NHS Executive, whose staff became civil servants, are described together with the way this reorganization changed the role and relationships …
Rurality, healthcare and crises
Moving to the countryside and staying’? Exploring doctors’ migration choices to rural areas
Absorbing it all
In a context of increasing international dialogue around the appropriate means and ends of newborn screening programmes, it is critical to explore the perspectives of those directly impacted by such screening. This meta-ethnography uses a systematic review process to identify qualitative studies that focus on parents' experiences of newborn screening published in English-language academic journals from 2000 to 2019 (n = 36). The included studies …
Young adults' experiences of biographical retrogression whilst living with long Covid
During the early years (2020-2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic, relatively little attention focused on experiences of people with long-lasting symptoms, particularly young adults who were commonly understood to be invulnerable to serious effects of the virus. Drawing on narrative interviews with 15 adults in their twenties and living in the UK when they became ill with long COVID, we explore contextual factors which made their long COVID illness exp…
Regional Offices in the New NHS
This article reports on a two‐year, multi‐method, qualitative study in two regional offices in the UK National Health Service of the changing role of the regional tier from the autumn of 1994. The nature of the changes from fourteen semiautonomous regional health authorities to eight regional offices of the NHS Executive, whose staff became civil servants, are described together with the way this reorganization changed the role and relationships …
The Changing Nature of Rationing in the UK National Health Service
This paper presents findings from empirical research exploring recent developments in healthcare rationing in the UK, and how far these were influenced by the National Health Service (NHS) internal market. Results suggest explicit rationing has continued to spread, but the focus has shifted from exclusions of whole treatments from NHS provision towards a reconciliation of implicit and explicit approaches. There is growing interest in explicit cri…
A Good‐Enough Service
By Bill New. King’s Fund and Institute for Public Policy Research, London, 1999, £7.50 (PB), 67 pp. ISBN 1-86030-093-6 UK citizens have high expectations of the NHS, as taxpayers, for themselves as patients and for their families and friends; as the government’s new NHS Plan1 claims, ‘the NHS is the public service most valued by the British people’. There has been much talk in recent years of excellence, a first class service, and a modern and de…
Understanding the role of opinion leaders in improving clinical effectiveness
Redesigning mental health services
Objectives To explore the involvement of mental health service users in the redesign of in‐patient mental health services in six Trusts participating in a multi‐regional NHS modernization programme. Design Semi‐structured interviews and observation of team meetings undertaken as part of an action research study. Participants and setting Users, clinical, medical and managerial staff from six mental health trusts which participated in the Northern …
Evidence-Based Medicine and the Implementation Gap
Evidence-based medicine was one of the earliest manifestations of evidence-based policy and practice, and has exercised substantial influence on other policy areas. Based on data from seven empirical studies carried out between 1993 and 1999, this article examines the origins and impact of EBM, and the complexities of implementation which have emerged. Policy makers and EBM enthusiasts alike have frequently taken a somewhat simplistic view of the…
Research, Policy and Practice – Worlds Apart
The relationship between research, policy and practice remains a contested area. This article explores pressures for researchers to make their work more useful and relevant to policy and practice, and for practitioners to undertake research. Whilst there are clearly areas of mutual interest and benefit, we argue that the research, policy and practice communities also have distinct traditions, skills and obligations which should be recognised and …
Just a bystander'? Men's place in the process of fetal screening and diagnosis
The Effect of Joint Interviewing on the Performance of Gender
The authors report a series of controlled comparisons of fifty-eight one-to-one qualitative interviews and thirty-seven mixed-sex joint interviews on the same health-related topics. Their analysis identifies comparative keyword frequencies and is supported by qualitative investigations of keywords in context, drawing on existing relevant knowledge of common gender differences in language choice. Gender differences are reduced and women's perspect…
Renewing Policy to Support Evidence‐based Health Care
Health systems internationally have developed policies to support evidence‐based health care (EBHC) for over a decade. As this article shows, the time is ripe to review current policy frameworks in an evidence‐based manner. We summarize key themes deriving from qualitative research on the UK EBHC implementation and draw out implications for policy renewal. Our diagnosis is different from current UK NHS (National Health Service) policy since we st…
Making it All Normal
Women are actively encouraged to educate themselves about pregnancy from formal sources (e.g., information leaflets, antenatal classes, books). In addition, informal stories of pregnancy and birth are routinely told between women. However, increased prenatal testing means that more fetuses are diagnosed with abnormalities, shifting the information requirements during pregnancy. Traditional sources of information cannot cover all possible outcomes…
Biographical disruption, abruption and repair in the context of Motor Neurone Disease
Concepts of biographical disruption and repair have been widely applied to chronic illness, but not terminal illness. This paper examines the relevance of these concepts to motor neurone disease (MND), a progressive neurological condition characterised by loss of mobility, speech and ability to breathe or swallow. Survival is usually between two and five years, and some die within a few months. The condition thus lies at the boundary between chro…
All in the same boat'? Patient and carer attitudes to peer support and social comparison in Motor Neurone Disease (MND)
Imagined futures
Background Knowledge of disability is considered key information to enable informed antenatal screening decisions by expectant parents. However, little is known about the role of experiential knowledge of disability in decisions to terminate or continue with a pregnancy diagnosed with a fetal abnormality. Objective To explore the role that expectant parents’ experiential knowledge of disabilities and conditions can play in real‐life decisions to …
Being differently the same
Understanding and Using Health Experiences
Narrative interviewing is an approach to eliciting people’s accounts, or stories, of their experiences. Widely used in social science research, it has gained prominence in health research since the late 1990s. Narrative interviewing contrasts with semi-structured and structured techniques which tend to focus on specific topics introduced by the researcher. The growing popularity of the approach has coincided with the rise in the promotion of pati…
Personal identity and the role of 'carer' among relatives and friends of people with multiple sclerosis
Informal caregiving continues to be a crucial part of health and social care provision in the developed world, but the processes by which the identity of informal caregiver is conferred, or assumed, remain unclear. In this article we draw on data from a qualitative research study which examined the experiences of family members and friends of people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) to explore how they interpret the label 'carer'. We conducted narra…
Biographical value
Illness narratives play a central role in social studies of health and illness, serving as both a key theoretical focus and a popular research method. Despite this, relatively little work has gone into conceptualising how and why illness narratives - be they in books, websites, television or other media - are commodified in contemporary healthcare and its social environment; namely, how distinctive forms of value are generated in the production, …
Collecting data on patient experience is not enough
The NHS has been collecting data on patients’ experience of care for over 10 years but few providers are systematically using the information to improve services. Angela Coulter and colleagues argue that a national institute of “user” experience should be set up to draw the data together, determine how to interpret the results, and put them into practice
Whose evidence is it anyway
Biosamples as gifts? How participants in biobanking projects talk about donation
BACKGROUND: In the UK, altruism has featured explicitly as an underpinning principle for biobanking. However, conceptualizing donation as altruistic downplays the role of reciprocity and personal or family benefit. OBJECTIVE: To investigate how biosample donors talk about their donation and whether they regard samples as 'gifts'. METHODS: In this qualitative study, 21 people, both healthy volunteers and people with health conditions, who had been…
A novel experience-based internet intervention for smoking cessation
ISRCTN29549695 DOI 10.1186/ISRCTN29549695 . Registered 17/05/2013
I knew before I was told
Is it worth it? Patient and public views on the impact of their involvement in health research and its assessment
BACKGROUND: There are mounting calls for robust, critical evaluation of the impact of patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research. However, questions remain about how to assess its impact, and whether it should be assessed at all. The debate has thus far been dominated by professionals. OBJECTIVE: To explore the views of PPI contributors involved in health research regarding the impact of PPI on research, whether and how it should be …
The power of symbolic capital in patient and public involvement in health research
BACKGROUND: Policy-makers and health research funders increasingly require researchers to demonstrate that they have involved patients in the design and conduct of research. However, the extent to which patients and public have the power to get involved on an equal footing is dependent on their economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. OBJECTIVE: To explore power relations in patient and public involvement (PPI) in research, particularly h…
Psychology (41 obras) · Medicine (38 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Sociology (33 obras) · Qualitative research (20 obras) · Health care (19 obras) · Public relations (19 obras) · Nursing (18 obras) · Social Psychology (16 obras) · Law (14 obras)