A UK GP has created a multi-language version of his website which offers a smoking pack years calculator for clinicians and patients.
Dr Nigel Masters, a GP in Buckinghamshire, said his Smoking Pack Years site receives 6,000 visitors a month from more than 60 countries worldwide. He hopes to extend its use further by offering the site in different languages.
With the help of friend and patients the site has now been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, French and Swiss German.
Dr Masters added: “Hopefully this will make it much easier for clinicians and patients in those countries to use it.”
The site enables users to enter a value for each of the types of tobacco smoked and the period of years over which the quantity entered was smoked to come up with a smoking pack years value.
Dr Masters told EHI Primary Care that he first wrote the tool together with Catherine Tutt, a respiratory nurse, because he wanted the information for his own patients but had no easy means of calculating it.
He added: “I get irritated by a lot of the calculators which are given to us and haven’t been tested in primary care and I felt that it was important clinically to have a single figure of cumulative dose so I decided to make my own. I would say that after blood pressure and weight it is the most important figure to record to individualise disease prediction.”
Together with Masters, a respiratory nurse, Dr Masters developed the tool and when it was shown to colleagues demand for it increased which is why he decided to put in on the web.
In his own practice, Dr Masters said a smoking pack year figure has been calculated for all patients and helped to identify more patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Dr Masters said the number of pack years has to be added to GP systems as free text to the summary although he hopes GP IT suppliers will incorporate it in their systems in future.
He added: “We are happy for people to use it free of charge. What we want to see is standardisation across the health service.”
Dr Masters has also won awards for his pioneering work on adding simple clinical indications to prescriptions for the elderly. In his own practice simple safety messages about the purpose of the drug and adverse drug and allergy reactions are added to the pharmacist’s label and the patient’s repeat prescription to aid understanding by patients and act as a quick reminder for GPs.
Dr Masters has showcased the work on another website but told EHI Primary Care he is still waiting for a computerised version to be available.
He added: “It means patients know what their medicine is for and as GPs can quickly see why we have prescribed something. At the moment everything is done manually but it is my vision that it will be computerised.”