Enriching relational knowing in stroke care
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Enriching relational knowing in stroke care: using appreciative action research to co-create a relationship-centred care approach to patient and family relationships and multidisciplinary working on stroke units.
IRAS ID
187509
Contact name
Clare Gordon
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Royal Bournemouth Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
Compassionate, dignified, relationship-focused care is under strain in the NHS. Alongside this, the NHS has improved the organisation and efficiency of hospital-based care. Since the publication of the 2007 National Stroke Strategy, stroke care has significantly improved their service organisation, however, focussing on the processes that improve quality and efficiency of clinical care can lead to practices not always informed by caring relationships. Health care staff can feel ineffectual if they are unable to fulfil their caring roles, and compassion fatigue linked to staff low emotional well-being well reported in the literature. Similarly improved emotional well-being is important for stroke survivors with recent surveys repeatedly highlighting the need for more individualised care and emotional support for stroke survivors and their carers. Relationship-centred care focusses on relationships between staff, patients and their families, with the importance of all having positive care encounters.
This study will explore the positive care experiences of stroke patients, their relatives and stroke unit staff. From this understanding staff, the patient and their relatives will together create care practices that enable these positive care experiences to happen more often. These will be developed in practice and shared with other stroke units through a tool-kit. It is planned to explore the application of this tool-kit in a second stroke unit setting.
The study will occur on a specialist stroke unit in a district general hospital in the south of England. Current stroke patients on the stroke unit and their relatives along with stroke unit healthcare staff will be invited to participate in the study. Data will be collected through interviews, observations of usual stroke unit care and discussion groups. The study will last for 20 months.
REC name
London - Harrow Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/LO/0085
Date of REC Opinion
11 Mar 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion