Today, we’re speaking to Dr Tori Ford, a qualitative researcher based at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.Title of papers: ‘Accumulative Experiences: Navigating Healthcare for Recurrent Vulvovaginal Thrush from Patient and Clinician Perspectives’ and ‘It’s not just thrush, it’s recurrent thrush’: Patient and Clinician Perspectives on Diagnosing Recurrent Vulvovaginal Candidiasis’.Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0437 and https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0531TranscriptThis transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.Speaker A00:00:01.280 - 00:01:15.200Hi, and welcome to BJGP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the associate editors of the journal. Thanks again for listening to this podcast today.In today's episode, we're speaking to Dr. Tori Ford, who is a qualitative researcher based at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. We're going to talk today about two linked papers that she and her team have published here in the bjgp.The first one is titled Accumulative Navigating Healthcare for Recurrent Vulvovaginal Thrush from Patient and Clinician Perspectives. And the second paper is it's not just thrush, it's recurrent thrush.Patient and Clinician Perspectives on Diagnosing Recurrent Vulva Vaginal Candidiasis. So, Tori, thanks very much for joining us here today.And this might come from a slightly unscientific perspective, but my feeling is that I'm seeing a lot more recurrent thrush in practice. And we know that it's incredibly common. I think, despite that, it's not something we hear discussed very often in primary care research.So my first question is, what made you want to study it?Speaker B00:01:15.520 - 00:01:54.060So, like you say, recurrent thrush is an increasingly common condition. We know that 1.2 million women in the UK live with it, 6% of people globally, and I just happen to have been one of them.So my paper came out of lived experience of living with recurrent thrush over many years and having a diagnostic journey of, you know, seeing different healthcare professionals looking for answers. And like you say, those feelings of shame and stigma that keep you feeling alone were all too familiar for me.So that's what actually led me into starting my PhD, looking at recurrent thrush and then wanting to hear other patient experiences as well.Speaker A00:01:54.460 - 00:02:22.220And we're looking at two of your papers here that were published in the bjgp, and they're both looking at the patient and the clinician perspective.And one thing that comes through really strongly in both papers is that recurrent thrush is often treated as if it's just repeated acute episodes rather than a condition in its own right. Why do you think that that distinction matters to patients and probably to clinicians as well, or should do?Speaker B00:02:22.380 - 00:03:55.420I think when we hear about thrush, it's often something that's seen as trivial or mundane, and that's often because it's through this lens of acute, transient, episodic, episod, and most of the time it is right. 75% Of people with Vaginas will have thrush at some point in their life.It's usually self managed over the counter with pharmacy care and symptoms resolved within a few days.But where recurrent thrush differs is when those symptoms keep coming back so that itching, burning pain and irritation becomes sometimes cyclical, sometimes repetitive. And I spoke to three or two patients who all had different durations of heat know, happening every two weeks, every month.And what they often found was because they were accessing fragmented care.So, you know, going to the pharmacy, sometimes going to the gp, sometimes maybe seeing sexual health, it was often seen as again, that mundane, one off, trivial case. And it was really hard to trace those patterns across care, especially due to a lack of continuity. Right.If you're trying to track a pattern but nobody is following you up, it's really difficult to, to capture those. So I think it's a few layers of one.I explore how these sort of social dimensions keep it seen as something maybe less long term, but then also in the ways that sort of care was fragmented made it harder for those patterns to be picked up and then to transition the care moving away from, you know, acute one off prescriptions of an antifungal medication to something that required repeat, repetitive, enduring, you know, testing, treatment, retesting of treatments.Speaker A00:03:56.060 - 00:04:09.970Absolutely. And I think what's interesting is that your papers describe recurrent thrush as something that's accumulative and cyclical over time.And you mentioned that it's not just these sort of one off episodes. Can you explain what patients meant by that?Speaker B00:04:10.210 - 00:05:13.850Yeah.So often, I think when we talk about ...
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