Use of patient experience data in inpatient mental health services
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Evaluating the Use of Patient Experience Data to Improve the Quality of Inpatient Mental Health Care (EURIPIDES)
IRAS ID
181897
Contact name
Scott Weich
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Warwick
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 8 months, days
Research summary
NHS England wants to refresh core values like compassion and patient-centred care. To ensure the patient voice is heard, Trusts must collect experiential feedback. Time and money are being spent on this without evidence about what questions to ask, how to collect this information or how it should be used to improve services.
We will address these issues by studying inpatient mental health care. Mental health care experiences tend to be worst in inpatient units, which are expensive to run and can be unwelcoming, disturbed and frightening places. Self-harm, suicide and violence occur, and there are persistent ethnic inequalities in experiences of care. We are confident that our findings about best practice in collecting and using patient experience data will be applicable in other healthcare settings.
We propose a bottom-up approach. It is unlikely that new top-down methods for collecting patient experience data would be readily adopted because this would mean abandoning what Trusts are already doing. The wide range of current approaches represents a natural experiment from which we can learn about what is (and isn’t) working.
We have 5 aims. After completing a systematic review to identify patient experience themes relevant to mental health care (Aim 1), we will describe and classify approaches to collecting and using patient experience data to improve inpatient mental health services across England (Aim 2). We will select 6 Trusts for in-depth case studies where we will carry out interviews to find out what works for whom, and where (Aim 3). We will look for evidence of service user and carer involvement, and for service improvement activity. We will present our findings to experts (including service users and carers) at a consensus conference to agree recommendations about best practice (Aim 4) and ensure these are anchored in what is acceptable and feasible in real-world NHS settings. Finally, we will use health economics to predict the costs that would arise (and savings that might occur) if best practice in collecting and using patient experience data was widely adopted, and we will speak to senior NHS colleagues to explore obstacles to this (Aim 5).
REC name
West Midlands - South Birmingham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/WM/0223
Date of REC Opinion
6 Jun 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion