University of Newcastle early career researcher and Accredited Practising Dietitian Dr Rebecca McLoughlin has been awarded an Asthma Australia fellowship to develop a shared decision-making toolkit to support the delivery of a personalised medicine strategy for people with chronic airway diseases – ‘Treatable Traits’.
Despite advances in treatment, people with severe disease continue to die from asthma, have an ongoing burden from asthma attacks and symptoms, and suffer serious side-effects of treatments. It has been suggested that this is because current management strategies tend to treat all patients the same way using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
Dr McLoughlin will work with people who have severe asthma and their physicians to co-design the ‘shared decision-making and priority-setting toolkit’. It will consist of a digital patient decision aid, a digital clinician decision aid, as well as a strategy to support the use of these aids in clinical practice.
By empowering patients to play an active role in their care and facilitating shared decision-making, it is hoped the project will improve treatment adherence and ultimately, their quality of life.
More details on Dr McLoughlin’s fellowship and research can be found here.
