Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust

For children with burn injuries, changing their dressings can be one of the most traumatising experiences of their treatment journey. This process is not only distressing for the children but also for their parents and the healthcare professionals involved. Current methods to reduce this trauma include the use of play therapists, but such resources are often limited. There is good evidence that Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) can help by providing a distracting and immersive environment that eases pain and fear. However, no studies have yet compared these two modern technologies to see which is more effective

A lot of information is known about how the perimenopause and menopause affects able bodied women. However there is very little information about how these affects women with spinal cord injury. This questionnaire study aims to collect information from women with a spinal cord injury on their experiences of going through the perimenopause and/or the menopause.

Patients with early pancreatic cancer often have symptoms that could also be caused by many common benign conditions, or no symptoms at all. Jaundice, weight loss and pain are 'red flag' symptoms of pancreatic cancer that are linked to incurable disease. At the moment only patients with 'red flag' symptoms are urgently referred for diagnostic testing to find out if they have the cancer. As a result, late diagnosis is a common feature of pancreatic cancer. This leads to limited treatment options being available to patients by the time they are diagnosed, and ultimately results in poor survival rates.
There is a clear need to improve earlier detection of pancreatic cancer so that patients with pancreatic cancer can be identified earlier and faster, enabling them to start treatment more quickly.
The study team is developing a non-invasive breath test that detects small molecules called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that may be altered by pancreatic cancers. For patients with non-specific symptoms, this test would help general practitioners (GPs) to identify those patients that may indeed have an underlying pancreatic cancer, who would benefit from referral for specialised pancreatic cancer tests.