About Us

HPR Ltd, the commercial arm of HPR, manages the licensing of questionnaires for use by other researchers and clinicians in clinical trials, as well as other research studies, routine audit and clinical practice. Athough using specialist translators for the questionnaires, the HPR in-house team is multi-lingual and able to deal with queries in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish and Russian.

HPR Ltd is based in the Orchard Building at Royal Holloway University of London, Egham. The campus is located about 20 miles west of Central London and about 5 miles from Heathrow Airport.

The activities of HPR and HPR Ltd are closely linked: HPR Ltd funds some of the research and development work of HPR.

The principals of HPR Ltd are:

Clare Bradley - Managing Director

Research Interests

Clare Bradley directs Health Psychology Research which includes the Diabetes Research Group and Renal Research Group plus additional health-related research projects.

The research and professional activities have two main themes:

Design, development, use, interpretation, linguistic validation and evaluation of psychological measures of processes and outcomes in management of chronic medical conditions, alongside biomedical measures.
Design, analysis and interpretation of clinical trials taking account of patient preferences and other psychological factors affecting biomedical and psychological outcomes.

Both themes share a common goal of increasing the attention given to psychological processes and patients' psychological outcomes and integrating these considerations with biomedical concerns with a view to improving patient care in terms of health outcomes and quality of life.

The special contributions of work conducted to date include:

- The development of diabetes-specific psychological measures which have proved to have greater reliability, validity and responsiveness to changes of interest in diabetes than have generic instruments. The success of the instruments is reflected by:

Funding to provide comparable measures for other conditions
Endorsement and use of instruments by the World Health Organisation and International Diabetes Federation
The many contracts with all the major pharmaceutical companies using the scales
Linguistic validation of the measures into more than 89 languages world-wide (click here to see lists of current languages and countries)

- The promotion of a paradigm shift away from the widespread acceptance of randomised controlled clinical trial designs for the evaluation of new treatments requiring the active involvement of patients, towards trial designs which take account of patients' preferences for the treatments to be studied; notably partially-randomised patient-centred designs (first suggested by Clare Bradley and Chris Brewin in 1989 - BMJ 299) which have been employed in a number of major clinical trials.

Specific Projects: Health Psychology

Psychological factors in diabetes management including:

The impact of different treatment regimens on quality of life
The importance of dietary freedom for quality of life
The effects of stress on blood glucose control
Cross-cultural issues

Measurement of psychological outcomes and processes in management of:

Diabetes in adults (including the frail elderly) and children
Kidney failure
Growth hormone deficiency
HIV
Hypothyroidism
Macular disease
Diabetic retinopathy and other eye conditions including glaucoma and cataract

Patient Reported Outcome measures including measures of:

Quality of life
Well-being
Treatment satisfaction
Knowledge

Evaluation of treatment technologies:

Insulins and other injectables for diabetes; oral hypoglycaemic agents, Continuous Subcutaneous Insulin Infusin (CSII) pumps and other methods of administering insulin: Blood glucose monitoring; Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating (DAFNE) training
Transplantation (kidneys and pancreatic islets)
Renal replacement therapies including haemodialysis and Continous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis (CAPD)
Treatments for macular disease and diabetic retinopathy including anti-VEGF drugs such as Lucentis and eccentric vision training for macular disease

Clinical trial design; particularly patient-centred, partially randomised alternatives to conventional randomised controlled trials.

Jonathan Gilbride - Commercial Director

The commercial director and company secretary of HPR Ltd is Jonathan Gilbride, who has extensive experience managing international companies. He deals primarily with all legal and commercial aspects of HPR's business. Contact him at jg@healthpsychologyresearch.com

Rosalind Plowright - Linguistic Validation Department

Rosalind Plowright, a linguist as well as a psychologist, heads the department managing the translation collection and supervises all linguistic validation work, much of which is conducted by questionnaire linguistic validation specialists, MAPI Institute in Lyon, France

Janet Bayfield - Administration, Non-Commercial

Janet Bayfield draws up the non-commercial licensing agreements with Universities, charities and hospitals.

Alison Wilson

Alison is involved with the Linguistic Validation of questionnaires and is responsible for their final formatting once completed. She is also responsible for their distribution to commercial licensees and ensuring that sample versions are available to view on the website, as part of her role of maintaining the HPR website.