Acute inpatient mental health services report high levels of safety incidents. The application of patient safety theory has been sparse, particularly concerning interventions that proactively seek patient perspectives. This recently published NIHR report details research to explore safety on acute mental health wards from patient perspectives using real-time technology.
We have recently published our NIHR research report on WardSonar – the first attempt to ask patients on acute mental health wards to measure and report changes in perceptions of safety in real-time. We have deepened our understanding of the co-design of digital interventions, explored milieu and contagion, and been able to understand the benefits and challenges of real-time safety monitoring.
Key points:
We examined previous researchers' attempts to involve patients in the design and development of mental health research on acute mental health wards.
We explored milieu and contagion, and how staff as well as patients perceive this. We continue to underestimate the impact of environment/milieu on wards.
We co-designed a digital intervention with staff and patients. WardSonar was deployed on a number of wards and our researchers collected our data and observed and interviewed patients and staff about WardSonar to understand how to implement technology onto wards in a more robust way.
We looked at similarities and differences in what patients and staff thought about WardSonar’s potential to make wards safer.
We learnt about how to develop digital interventions for clinical environments and made recommendations about how to implement them on wards in the future.
We reported our main findings (under review) which suggest when patients tell you the ward is becoming unsafe incidents are more likely to happen in the next 4 hours.
Patients could also anonymously suggest what was making things unsafe; e.g. other patients, staff or the environment. The challenge remains – getting staff to use real-time data to become more proactive thereby preventing incidents.
Thanks to the team, staff and patients involved, particularly during Covid. We need to build on this work to examine the implementation of co-designed (not imposed) technologies on wards to make them safer.
