AAIR Charity Sir Stephen Holgate Awards
The AAIR Charity is delighted to award two MSc Allergy Students with AAIR Charity Sir Stephen Holgate Award. These awards are made annually to students who have excelled in their dissertation projects.
Student: Rebecca Briggs
Title of MSc Project: Home food reintroduction – a prospective survey assessment of patient satisfaction and compliance, with overall analysis of results at the Peninsula Immunology and Allergy Adult Unit.
Food allergy has a negative impact on quality of life, which highlights the importance of correct diagnosis. UK allergy services are under immense pressure to provide safe and effective care at lower cost. Traditionally supervised oral food challenges are undertaken to prove food tolerance, but these are expensive and have extensive waiting lists. A home food reintroduction service was established at the Peninsula Allergy Tertiary Adult Service allowing suitable low risk patients to reintroduce suspect foods at reduced cost to themselves and the service, potentially reducing waiting times for challenges in hospital.
My project was to evaluate this service, by data review and survey responses, to find out if patients completed the home reintroduction, what the outcomes were and whether patients were satisfied with the process. Out of 51 patients, 60.8% completed the food reintroduction and 83.9% were tolerant of the food. Satisfaction with the process was high. It was concluded that the service was safe and effective in supporting patients to reintroduce foods. Results can be used to inform clinical practice and outline a way to enable low risk patients, in a controlled fashion, to prove tolerance of foods, avoiding the cost, time and resources of supervised challenges.
Student: Dr Sarah Lewis
Title of MSc Project: Uncontrolled Asthma and Related Risk Factors in Children in Ireland
Asthma is the most common long-term illness in childhood. Asthma can be ‘controlled’, or treated, using safe and effective asthma medicines, enabling most children to live a healthy and active life. Despite this, many children have frequent asthma symptoms and miss school and activities, with some needing hospitalisation.
Complacency around asthma is common among parents and healthcare providers and asthma symptoms are often not recognised. Previous studies found that uncontrolled asthma was common in children attending hospital clinics, even among those not attending for asthma care.
There is limited recent research in Ireland about uncontrolled asthma. The aim of this study was to find out how many children attending hospital services in Dublin, Ireland, had poorly controlled asthma, and to further explore why this might be.
We found that nearly 60% of children who attended outpatient clinic appointments had uncontrolled asthma. Younger children, and children who had missed activities over the previous year, were more likely to have uncontrolled asthma. Children with poorly controlled asthma received more oral steroids, had more emergency department visits, and had found it harder to get medical care for asthma, than children with well-controlled asthma.
Uncontrolled asthma is common in children attending paediatric hospitals in Ireland. All hospital visits are an opportunity to ask about asthma, and to reduce the avoidable burden and risk from asthma for children.