Online Peer Support for Long-Term Conditions: Protocol for a Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Over 30% of people in the United Kingdom are living with a long-term physical health condition. Early preventative peer support interventions could improve the lives and psychosocial well-being of people with long-term physical health conditions and reduce progression of any symptoms of low mood to more significant depression. In partnership with people with long-term conditions and industry stakeholders, we have co-designed an online peer support platform, CommonGround, to help people with long-term health conditions connect, support others, share experiences, and receive evidence-based information and advice on self-management. OBJECTIVE: This feasibility randomized controlled trial will investigate whether the CommonGround platform is usable and acceptable for people with long-term physical health conditions experiencing mild depressive symptoms and whether conducting a future, larger confirmatory randomized controlled trial is feasible. METHODS: A mixed methods, 2-arm, parallel-group, unblinded randomized controlled feasibility trial will be conducted nationally across the United Kingdom. Participants will include 150 adults (aged ≥18 years) who have access to the internet and are living with at least one long-term physical health condition and subthreshold depression (scoring 5-9 on the Patient Health Questionnaire-8). Following baseline assessments, eligible participants will be randomized to a coproduced online peer support and psychoeducation platform or a control condition where participants will receive fortnightly emails containing links to the National Health Service mental health web pages. Assessment measures will be collected at baseline and the midintervention (6 weeks) and postintervention (12 weeks) time points. A purposive sample of approximately 40 participants will be interviewed after the intervention to evaluate participant experiences and views on acceptability. The primary feasibility outcome is the number of participants recruited to the trial per week and in total via each recruitment route (as self-reported by participants). RESULTS: Recruitment for the feasibility trial began on February 12, 2024. Quantitative data collection was completed by October 23, 2024, and qualitative data collection was completed by December 3, 2024. CONCLUSIONS: This trial will explore the acceptability and feasibility of our coproduced online peer support platform with embedded psychoeducational resources targeted for people living with long-term physical health conditions and subthreshold depression who are at risk of developing major depressive disorder. The findings will inform the future design of a larger randomized controlled trial exploring the platform's clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06222346; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06222346. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/71513.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.055 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.133 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".