Professor Martyn Partridge National Heart and Lung Institute

Summary

Martyn Partridge was appointed Emeritus Professor of Respiratory Medicine in November 2018. After nearly 19 years as a Consultant in Respiratory Medicine in East London, he was invited to apply for a post at Imperial College at the end of 2001 and appointed to a Chair in Respiratory Medicine based on the Charing Cross Campus. The brief was for non-lab based research and to develop a new programme researching the delivery of respiratory healthcare. The focus was on patient centred care and on translational research, from lab to bedside, or more importantly lab to bedside to community. Specific areas of research included earlier and more accurate diagnosis of respiratory disease (setting up community based diagnostic services), evaluation of service enhancements such as the organisation of specialist consultation services, the use of lay educators, telephone consultations, electronic asthma and COPD self management action plans, and methods of enhancing communication between both patients and doctors, and specialists and General Practitioners. He has a particular interest in the subject of health literacy and in simplifying information materials and questionnaires (such as the Epworth Sleepiness score) to enhance comprehension. Developing good relations with local general practitioners was essential to this work and lead to further work on integrating primary and secondary care and the appointment of a Primary Care Trust funded Consultant in Integrated respiratory care to Imperial NHS Charing Cross Hospital. Martyn subsequently chaired the British Thoracic Society Integrated Care working party to further promote this change in care delivery whereby hospital specialists work for large parts of their time outside of the hospital.

An essential part of good healthcare is a well trained workforce and for several years Professor Partridge headed Year 6 of the undergraduate programme and chaired the clinical years sub committee of the undergraduate education committee where he was also a deputy director of education. He developed a portfolio of E learning modules covering most of respiratory medicine and evaluated these and methods of developing blended learning and the use of virtual worlds. He has received a Rectors award for Excellence in teaching.

In 2010 he was asked to move to Singapore as Senior Vice Dean for the joint Imperial College/Nanyang Technological University Medical School (subsequently named the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine). Here he was responsible for the introduction of a completely fresh curriculum and pedagogy developed with great assistance and cooperation from Singaporean Colleagues and with phenomenal input from many very helpful Imperial Colleagues who provided specialist subject content. From being the only Imperial person based in Singapore in 2010, to the time he left at the end of his contract in 2013, the school had developed all the plans for two superb buildings, interim buildings, a new method of selecting medical students, and faculty recruited Internationally and from the locally based AStar. On his return to the UK he changed campus and assumed a part time post as Professor of Respiratory Medicine and Patient Centred Care. During the tenure of this post he has continued teaching on several Imperial courses and on the BSc Respiratory Science course (where he introduced Team Based Learning for the first time), and he has chaired numerous panels selecting future Imperial Medical Students.

Outside of Imperial Martyn has chaired the Education Committees of the British Thoracic Society (BTS), Asthma UK, the Board of Trustees of Education for Health, and the Dissemination Committee of the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA). He has also served as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the British Thoracic Society for 3 years and subsequently as President. He was awarded the BTS medal in 2016. He has been external examiner to many overseas universities and regularly visits Hong Kong University/Shenzhen Hospital as a visiting professor.

Professor Partridge was Chief Medical Adviser to Asthma UK for many years, a member of the GINA (Global Initiative for Asthma) Executive and for 17 years he was closely involved with the production of the British Asthma Guidelines. He chaired the UK Department of Health (DH) Asthma Steering Group which produced National Good Practice Guides for Adult and Childhood asthma and was a Chairman of the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) Asthma Deaths Audit Steering Group. He has led on a number of WHO initiatives and served for several years as a member of the Medical Aerosols sub-committee of the United Nations Environment Programme overseeing the phase out of CFCs. He has received a Rotary International community and vocational service award for his previous work in establishing an NHS Palliative Medicine service and served for over 2 years as a Specialist adviser for the Care Quality Commission. He has very close links with the Pakistan Chest Society and visits Pakistan regularly. Martyn is currently vice Chair of the Trustees of the Primary Care Respiratory Society.

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Software Downloads

The Imperial College Electronic Asthma Action Plan Software (E-AAP)

Self management support and the issuing of a written action plan has been shown to improve outcomes for asthma. We have developed an electronic pictorial asthma action plan (E-PAAP)¹ which incorporates pictorial asthma action plans into a software package. This software package should help overcome problems of access to paper templates, by calculating peak flow action thresholds and by prompting correct completion.

The background to the development of the software has been published² and the software is available free for healthcare professionals and other colleagues to use. The latest version was updated in 2014 to include newer formulations of medication and also now permits you to personalise the action plan to your institution or health centre. The next revision is planned for 2018/9 .If you have any comments or queries about the software please contact Professor Partridge (m.partridge@imperial.ac.uk).

1. Roberts NJ, Mohamed Z, Wong PS, Johnson M, Loh LC, Partridge MR. The development and comprehensibility of a pictorial asthma action plan. Patient Educ Couns 2009; 74(1):12-18.
2. Roberts N, Evans G, Blenkhorn P, Partridge M. Development of an electronic pictorial asthma action plan and its use in primary care. Patient Educ Couns 2010; 80(1):141-146.  

Instructions for installation

Download the zip archive file: Asthma software file  Once downloaded, expand the archive to a folder and run the setup.exe contained therein to install the application. After installation the application can be found on your Start menu.

Requires Windows Vista or above and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4. Most modern Windows computers have the .NET Framework 4 already installed, but if it is missing, it can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17718

The imperial College Electronic COPD Action Plan Software (E-COPD-AP)

A similar action plan suitable for those with COPD has also been produced and evaluated ³. The new 2014 version includes newly introduced medications and also permits you to personalise the plan to your institution or health centre. The next revision is planned for 2018/9.If you have any comments or queries about the software please contact Professor Partridge (m.partridge@imperial.ac.uk).

3.  Roberts NJ & Partridge MR. Evaluation of a paper and electronic pictorial COPD action plan. Chronic Respiratory Disease, 2011, 8: 31-40

A Glossary of terms in Respiratory Medicine for use by patients

It is increasingly good practice to permit patients access to their medical records and to copy to patients correspondence being sent from a specialist to the patients primary care physician. Unfortunately the use of medical terminology reduces the comprehensibility of these ventures. Colleagues may therefore wish to download a copy of terms used in respiratory medicine which has been evaluated in the publication listed below.

 

Brown C, Roberts NR & Partridge MR. Does use of a glossary aid patient understanding of the letters being sent to their general practitioner? Clinical Medicine, 2007, 7: 457-460.

 

Pictorial Epworth Sleepiness Scale

The Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) was designed to be self-completed by the patient. However, it may not be understood by all and unrecognised problems with literacy can impair the process. We have translated the ESS into a pictorial version for use in those with normal or diminished literacy skills.  http://pictorialepworthimperial.blogspot.com/

An evaluation of the patients’ ability to self complete the ESS was undertaken in sleep and non-sleep respiratory clinics. Errors or problems encountered were recorded on a standard questionnaire. With the aid of a medical artist, pictorial representations of the eight ESS questions were developed and the new pictorial ESS was offered to patients alongside the traditional ESS. The two scales were compared for agreement with a kappa statistic and patients were asked to record a preference for either the written or the pictorial scale.

The evaluation of the traditional ESS showed that 33.8% (27/80) of ESS naive patients made errors and 22.5% (18/80) needed help completing the questionnaire. The translated pictorial ESS showed good agreement with the traditional ESS on most questions (median kappa score 0.63, IQR 0.04). Fifty five percent reported a preference for the pictorial scale compared to the standard written ESS. More people (75.6%) reported the pictorial ESS to be very easy in contrast to (64.6%) the worded ESS questionnaire.

Errors are common when patients self-complete the traditional written ESS. Pictures with words have been shown to enhance the understanding and translation of medical information and a pictorial translation of the ESS produces comparable scores to the traditional ESS and may be a suitable alternative for those with normal or diminished literacy.

R Ghiassi,  K Murphy, A Cummin, M R Partridge. Developing a pictorial Epworth Sleepiness Scale, Thorax 2011 66(2):97-100

R Ghiassi  and M R Partridge. Health Literacy and Sleep Apnoea, Thorax 2011 66(2):180

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