You will be helping researchers locally and at Keele University (who specialise in hand osteoarthritis) to investigate ways of improving the care of people with thumb base osteoarthritis in the future.

The questionnaires will take 20 minutes to complete.
Sometimes using a pen and holding a phone or tablet can be painful; if so please ask for help to complete the questionnaires.

Yes certainly, just contact us

If you have a concern about any aspect of this study, you should ask to speak to a member of the local hospital study team, or the TOPS study Team and they will do their best to answer your questions. Contact us

You can do this through your local NHS complaints procedure, contact your local NHS Patient Advice and Liaison Service. Your local service can be located at this website

You can speak to your therapist who can provide more detail personalised to you.
More information is available on other websites. Follow the links on the OA Information Page.

If you are part of the TOPS Study and you have been placed on a waiting list for surgery for your hand, we would like to continue to follow your progress over the six-month period from when you started the TOPS study. You will receive a questionnaire, to complete as normal. There is a section in the questionnaire asking you to inform us if you have been placed on a waiting list or had surgery. Surgery has been found to reduce pain and improve hand use. The standard operation (trapeziectomy) does take a long period of recovery, often 3 months of rehabilitation (exercises and splint use), and strength may not be regained fully, taking about a year to reach the best outcome.
If you haven’t already done so, speak with your therapist, hand surgeon or GP about surgery if you feel your symptoms are not improving, or are unmanageable.
The following website is a useful source.

All information collected as part of the study will be kept confidential. The data collected will be kept separately from your contact details using a unique study number. This means your data are stored anonymously and, on this basis, may be used in other research studies. If you withdraw from the study any de-identified data previously collected will be used in data analysis. Keep on reading for more detail.