Patient work assessment

Centre for Health Informatics

Research stream: Consumer informatics

Project members - Macquarie University

Dr Annie Lau - Senior Research Fellow

Dr Kathleen Yin - Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Project main description

Living with a health condition does not come naturally. Following a diagnosis or medical interventions, patients and their families must undertake extra work to accommodate their health condition, such as making time to administer medications, to visit medical professionals regularly, or to prepare special meals. The concept of ‘patient work’ describes these health-related tasks the patient must somehow integrate into their daily routine. When integrated poorly, these tasks have the potential to generate extra stress and fatigue, contributing to incompliance to medical regimes and affecting the health outcomes of the patient.

In this project, we wish to investigate how patient work impacts patients, identifying areas in their daily lives that we can best intervene to improve health outcomes in chronic health conditions. Moreover, we are also interested to know if we can identify areas in the lives of healthy populations that we can target for preventative health, thus increasing the efficacy of current health promotion measures.

Project sponsors

NSW Health Early-Mid Career Fellowship

NHMRC CRE in eHealth

Collaborative partners

Macquarie University Hospital
University of Oxford
University College London

Related projects

Mobile app for self-management and consumer engagement

Social Network Interventions for Consumer Health

Project status

Current

Centres related to this project

Centre for Health Informatics