Making information about gout and its treatment more understandable to patients with gout

Name: The effect of personalised visualisation of information about gout on illness perceptions and medications beliefs in patients with gout. Patients diagnosed with tophaceous gout, who already participated in other studies and expressed an interest in future studies will be contacted via a phone call or email by a co-ordinating investigator (CI). They will be informed about the study and invited to participate. If they express interest, the co-ordinating investigator (PhD in Health Psychology candidate) will forward them a participant information sheet and a consent form. Participants’ medical records concerning their diagnosis of gout will be reviewed by the CI to identify participants who have undergone computed tomography for gout in the past two years. Individuals with recent CT scans will be randomised either to the personalised or non-personalised visualisation group. Individuals who do not have recent CT scans for gout will be allocated to the control group. Participants will not know which group they were allocated to. Individuals who met the eligibility criteria and agreed to participate in the study will be invited to attend a single 30-40 minute session at the Clinical Research Centre at Auckland Medical School. At the lab, having signed the consent form, participants will be offered to complete a set of baseline assessment questionnaires followed by a 12-minute educational presentation. The questionnaires will ask about a range of questions about participants’ attitudes towards gout, its treatment, and demographic information. The presentation will be targeting medication non-adherence and include recommendations from the New Zealand Ministry of Health, as well as information and images from “To Stop Gout You Need to Bring Your Uric Acid Levels Down” booklet that is available online at the New Zealand Ministry of Health website. Participants in the control group will see only this presentation and get verbal information about how computed tomography could be used for gout diagnosing and monitoring, but they will not see any examples of CT scans. Individuals in the non-personalised visualisation group will see the same presentation and generic CT scans showing gout. The co-ordinating investigator will also explain how CT scans are used in gout monitoring and show generic CT scans for gout. Participants in the personalised visualisation group will see the same presentation with their own CT scans incorporated in it. The co-ordinating investigator will explain how CT scans are used in gout monitoring and show patients their own scans stressing the point that the scans they see are their own CT results. The intervention will be based on a PowerPoint presentation delivered on a laptop as well as verbal information about gout, its diagnosis and treatment. The co-ordinating investigator (the PhD in Health Psychology candidate) will follow a memorised script accompanied with images explaining gout and the medication for gout incorporated into a PowerPoint presentation. Patients under all conditions will receive equal amount of textual and verbal information. Right after the intervention all participants will be asked to complete the second assessment, provide feedback and ask any questions they might have about the study.