Exploring the sustainability of quality improvement interventions in healthcare organisations: a multiple methods study of the 10-year impact of the ‘Productive Ward: Releasing Time to Care’ programme in English acute hospitals

Summary

The ‘Productive Ward: Releasing Time to Care’ programme is a quality improvement (QI) intervention introduced in English acute hospitals a decade ago to:

• increase time nurses spend in direct patient care
• improve safety and reliability of care
• improve experience for staff and patients
• make changes to physical environments to improve efficiency.

The objective of this paper, published in BMJ Quality & Safety, was to explore how timing of adoption, local implementation strategies and processes of assimilation into day-to-day practice relate to one another and shape any sustained impact and wider legacies of a large-scale quality improvement intervention.