CLECC feasibility study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Creating Learning Environments for Compassionate Care (CLECC): a feasibility study
IRAS ID
152184
Contact name
Jackie Bridges
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
There is widespread public concern about the lack of compassion in hospital nursing care experienced by older people. This study aims to put CLECC (Creating Learning Environments for Compassionate Care) into practice and do the groundwork needed for a future study to test that it works. CLECC is a nursing practice development programme to promote compassionate care for older hospital patients. Education is often proposed as one solution to the quality problems, but the best approach is not known. Previous research indicates that workplace learning and a focus on ward nursing teams may be most effective, but no research to date has assessed the impact of such programmes on the quality of care. This study aims to begin to address this gap.
CLECC is targeted at registered nurses (RNs) and care assistants (CAs) working in hospitals. The ward, rather than the classroom, is the main place for learning for staff and the learning is led by a senior nurse for education. CLECC focuses on creating ward manager and nursing team ways of working (“practices”) that support individual RNs and CAs to be compassionate with patients. These team practices include regular discussions on improving compassionate care and responding to patient feedback. Each ward manager/sister attends learning groups with other managers to develop their compassionate care leadership role. “Care makers” volunteer from the ward team to receive additional training in doing observations of care and feeding back to colleagues. All RNs and CAs also attend 8 hours of classroom learning, with patient input and a focus on understanding patient experiences.
We will implement CLECC on 4 wards in 2 English hospitals, with 2 other wards acting as our control (that is, “business as usual”). During and after the 4 months that CLECC takes to implement, we will interview CLECC ward nursing staff, patients and visitors about CLECC. Interview data will be used to understand if CLECC can be easily put into practice and what factors influence its workability. This may lead to some changes to CLECC before it is used again. We will also test out some methods to inform the design of a future evaluation. We aim that the future evaluation will give us a clear answer as to whether CLECC can make a measurable difference to compassion in patient care. Aspects of a future study that we will pilot include randomising wards to use CLECC or not, finding the best way to measure compassion, making sure we can recruit enough people into the study and explore some areas that we don’t yet know enough about, for instance, how many staff might change jobs between a CLECC ward and another ward, and would this “contaminate” the results. Findings out the answers to our questions will give us the best chance of designing an effective future evaluation of CLECC.REC name
Social Care REC
REC reference
14/IEC08/1018
Date of REC Opinion
17 Nov 2014
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion