Description: Selina Hussain recently involved First Steps in her research project. Selina’s work highlighted the following:

1) Extensive amount of research has found social media to have a negative influence on an individual’s mental wellbeing through negative self-evaluation.

2) Results found that there were 7 fundamental factors influencing one’s self-perception and mental wellbeing: Social Media Interactions, Emotional Responses Associated with Social Media, Media Portrayal, Life Experiences, Understanding Eating Disorder Symptomology, Personal Experiences of Eating Disorders and Identified Personality Attributes.

3) The study supported that of previous studies which demonstrated that social media has a negative impact on one’s self-perception and mental-wellbeing, contributing to the development and maintenance of eating disordered behaviour.

Description: Recently, we had the privilege of supporting student Justin Tetlow with his research project.  Some of our service users and workers were involved in the work. Justin is able to now report his key findings, which are:

1) There is a perception that there is a lack of GP knowledge of Eating Disorders. Therefore an education package may need to be developed for either medical students or GP Trainees.

2) For mild to moderate EDs, BMI is often not relevant. An alternative diagnostic criterion may be useful perhaps based on ED behaviours.

3) Continuity of Care was a priority for many EDI’s and carers. This may be crucial in the management of mild to moderate ED in primary care.

4) Questions for GPs to screen patients for EDs were summarised during the PPI events and future research could validate these.

The most practically useful thing to come out of the project is the potential to replace SCOFF.

Next steps:

Justin is going to hand in his dissertation by the end of the month, then hopes to write a paper to submit to a journal in the autumn. Justin has also had a Poster accepted for the National Royal College of GP conference in October.