Use of Video Technology to assist Occupational Therapists with discharging stroke patients

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Can Occupational Therapists use video technology to assess a patient’s home prior to discharge from an Acute Stroke Unit?

• IRAS ID

  172399

• Contact name

  Ruth Harris

• Sponsor organisation

  St George's University of London

• Duration of Study in the UK

  years, 5 months, 17 days

• Research summary

  Evidence based guidelines (RCP 2012, NICE 2013) recommend that patients following a stroke should be provided with therapy for 45 minutes daily. Providing patients with intensive therapy has been proven to improve patients’ recovery. Adherence to these guidelines are nationally audited and published. However, national audit results show that Occupational Therapists (OTs) are not attaining this therapy target.

  It is considered that this is in part due to the large proportion of time that OTs spend on discharge planning tasks such as visits to patient’s home called Access Visits. These visits are an integral part of the discharge planning process and involves an OT travelling to a patient's property and assessing the property to determine whether the home needs any modifications prior to the patient being discharges from hospital. Each visit can take up to two hours of an OTs time.

  Video technology has been used in other aspects of healthcare as a more time efficient but as effective way to deliver health care. This study aims to investigate whether OTs could use video technology to assist with undertaking access visits. This study will be designed as a diagnostic accuracy study and intends to determine whether OT’s assessing a patient’s property from a video recording is as accurate as a standard OT AV.

  Following consent, an OT will visit a patient’s home and take a video recording of the patient's home (see video guideline). The same OT will then complete a standard OT access visit (standard care). The video recording will then be watched by another OT (blinded to the results of the standard AV) to assess the home. Both types of assessment then be compared to determine whether OTs can identify the same needs for home modifications from a video recording, as a standard assessment access visit does.

• REC name

  London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  15/LO/0670

• Date of REC Opinion

  19 Jun 2015

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion