General Practioners’ (GP’s), working in groups, are now in charge of deciding what services they fund for their patients. Guidance is available to help with this but can be limited for some problems. One such area is managing foot conditions, particularly those causing pain. The more information available about, how many people have foot pain, who those people are and what happens to them currently, will help GP’s to make some of the decisions they need to make about services.
This study aims to find out how much foot pain, caused for various different reasons, has been seen by GP’s over the past 10 years. We will look at how many cases of foot pain there were and how many of those were new problems. We will then look at patterns of those patients compared to patients without foot pain such as age, male/ female, other medical conditions they also have and lifestyle (including how much patients weigh and if they are a smoker or not). We then will look at what the GP may have done to help such as sent them for further tests (such as an x-ray or blood test) or referred them to someone else.
The main goal of this study is to identify how many people general practitioners (doctors) record as having foot and ankle pain at a given time (between January and December of each year between 2004 and 2014) and how many new cases they record over a period of time (January to December each year between 2004 and 2014). This information will also be separated by: age groups (0-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, 90+), gender (male/ female) and living and financial characteristics of people.
We will look at those with foot and ankle pain to see if they have similar illnesses, particularly bone, muscle or joint problems or diabetes, whether they smoke, consume alcohol and how much they weigh.
Finally, we will look to see how people with foot or ankle pain use medication (tablets) to help improve pain, how many appointments with their doctor they have for foot or ankle pain and if they have had any special tests organised or seen any specialists about the pain.
For each person with foot or ankle pain, three similar people without it will be provided allowing for comparison between those with and without foot and ankle pain.
Catherine Bowen - Chief Investigator - University of Southampton
Rachel Ferguson - Corresponding Applicant - Solent NHS Trust, Podiatry
Andrew Judge - Collaborator - University of Oxford
Daniel Prieto-Alhambra - Collaborator - University of Oxford
Nigel Arden - Collaborator - University of Southampton
HES Admitted Patient Care;Patient Level Index of Multiple Deprivation;Practice Level Index of Multiple Deprivation