Professor Glyn Elwyn has been appointed to one of the new ‘linked’ chairs in Cardiff University. He joined CHSR in May along with his colleagues Professor Adrian Edwards, who has been awarded a personal chair in General Practice, and Dr Rhodri Evans, moving from the Department of Primary Care, Swansea Clinical School.

Their research areas fit in well with the CHSR themes and include major areas of work in shared decision making, risk communication and quality improvement in health care, in liaison with the Centre for Quality of Care Research in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Current work involves demand management by referral assessment (endoscopy), the evaluation of GP out of hours services in SE Wales and a cost effectiveness analysis of diagnostic tests for H.

Above: Professor Glyn Elwyn

Recent work in decision making and risk communication has focussed on the development of on-line decision aids for patients with an example being 'Prosdex' for prostate cancer screening (www.prosdex.org.uk). Prosdex was funded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Screening Programme. Other work in this area involves assessing the reaction of women to multimedia decision aids about the risk of developing breast cancer. Professors Elwyn and Edwards are lead collaborators in an International Patient Decision Aid Standard setting Collaboration (IPDAS) and will be presenting their work at the 3rd International Shared Decision Making Conference in Ottawa in June 2005.

Above: Professor Adrian Edwards