Linkage of MINAP with GPRD permits researchers to establish a longitudinal patient journey before and after ACS, while providing greater clinical detail on ACS events than is reliably available within GPRD.
The ALF is used to link anonymised individuals across data sets, thus supporting the opportunity to conduct longitudinal analyses of an individual's journey through multiple health, education and social data sets.
It is not tumour-site specific and can be used in a longitudinal manner by patients throughout their cancer journey.
In contrast, primary care data records a longitudinal picture of a patient's clinical journey, but some events managed directly in secondary care might be missed.
Investigations that provide an in-depth longitudinal analysis of the steps involved in the service journey are much rarer.
FOF may reduce activity levels through reduced exercise self-efficacy and fewer journeys outside the home which, if replicated in longitudinal studies, may be areas for intervention to reduce the activity-limiting effects of FOF.
As part of a longitudinal study at the National ALS Centre in Dublin, following the patient and caregiver journey, informal caregivers of people with ALS were asked about the time up to the ALS diagnosis and what it was like for the caregiver.
In a sample of volunteers selected from the longitudinal study (about 20%% of all respondents), the smart phone application Moves will be used to track journeys and automatically detect active travel modes over the study period (https://www.moves-app.com/), as shown previously by others [ 32, 33].
Data for this analysis were drawn from a merged dataset of two completed dyadic longitudinal health-related quality of life (HRQL) studies comprised of children undergoing BMT and their accompanying parent (Journeys to Recovery (JTR) and HSCT-CHESS™, described elsewhere [ 16- 18]).
As issues of time and timing are of paramount importance in longitudinal qualitative research, we have opted for identifying time points by key transitions in the patient's journey rather than having the same time points for all participants.
