Living well with breathlessness

Groundbreaking research from Hull York Medical School into the experience of breathlessness is inspiring the ‘Breathing Space’ garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 – highlighting how mind and body approaches can help people manage distress and reclaim control over their breathing.  The garden, designed by Angus Thompson for Asthma + Lung UK and sponsored by Project Giving Back, draws directly […]

In 2023, with the support of an incredible team, Dr. Ruth Barker and Russell Winwood (the COPD Athlete) launched The COPD Baton Pass, a 24-hour live broadcast for World COPD Day. This ambitious initiative established a platform to raise awareness of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).   In 2024, Ruth and Russell returned with renewed focus,

Here at the University of Hull, we think it’s essential to involve those who will be affected by our research in helping us to develop and carry out our projects. We have been involving people who live with chronic breathlessness in our research for several years. Here we want to reflect on what we have

We are very pleased to announce that we have received funding from the Research for Patient Benefit Programme of the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research (NIHR) to conduct a full trial to determine the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of breathlessness management training for people with pulmonary fibrosis, the BREEZE 2 trial. This

In October 2023, we wrote a blog post called ‘The Big Baton Pass: hoping to change the way we mark World COPD Day in the future’ with the co-founders of the Big Baton Pass event. Our hopes for the Big Baton Pass event set the bar very high! Before this event there had not been

World COPD Day is a day in November marked annually by many individuals living with COPD and healthcare professionals, as well as many national and international foundations and organisations, doing something of their choice to raise awareness of COPD. To date, there has not been a coordinated awareness campaign on World COPD Day which joins

Last weekend I took the Bringing breathlessness into view exhibition to the beautiful Hepworth Arcade for Hull’s Freedom Festival. The exhibition was described in the program as ‘a unique collaboration between the Medical and the Arts world’ and I was very heartened by the public response to it! Over five days there were 199 visitors, many

Well, here in Hull at the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre we have been researching how different airflow speeds from a handheld fan affect recovery from breathlessness in both patients and healthy people. We aimed to find out what is the best airflow speed from a fan to help recovery from breathlessness. In our fan

What is it like when the symptoms of people living with COPD get much worse and what language do they use to describe this? This is what we aimed to understand in our study in which we interviewed 40 people from around England. Generally clinicians say that someone is having an exacerbation if their symptoms

This wonderful set of booklets popped through my letterbox the other day and immediately caught my attention! They were beautifully presented and had much in them to appeal to the senses. Sometimes as a researcher it is easy to get caught up in thinking rather than paying attention to the senses and yet everyone’s daily