#WardSonar:real-time measure of safety for mental health wards ProEval
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Developing a service user centred co-designed patient safety intervention for acute mental health wards: A mixed methods process evaluation.
IRAS ID
300833
Contact name
John Baker
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 30 days
Research summary
Acute mental health wards are not safe places, there are many incidents of violence, aggression and self harm, only some of which are captured by existing incident reporting processes. When incidents and other safety data are currently collected, details are only available some time afterwards and service users’ viewpoints are rarely included. Research has shown patients are happy to report safety issues in general hospitals but this has not been tried on mental health wards.
This project will test a monitoring tool (#WardSonar) to measure how safe service users on mental health wards are feeling in real-time, and make this information available to ward staff in order to help them manage safety.
#WardSonar has been designed with service users and staff and is ready to be tested on wards. The project had two phases. Phase 1 developed the #WardSonar monitoring tool for collecting data from service users and feeding it back to staff. It was developed by carrying out interviews with service users and staff and reviewing the relevant literature. #WardSonar consists of a short anonymous questionnaire hosted on a handheld computer tablet, service users complete it and the aggregate responses are displayed on a dashboard on the staff computers.
Phase 2 is an in-depth study with data collected for 14 weeks on six wards. We will collect data from the #WardSonar monitoring tool and routine ward data about staffing, occupancy and incidents. During focused ethnographic visits researchers will observe how staff use the information, administer standardised measures to staff and carry out brief interviews with staff and service users about using #WardSonar. This will tell us how useful #WardSonar is and if it shows promise it will be used to inform the design of a randomised controlled trial.
This application relates to Phase 2, the 14 week process evaluation.REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 2 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/EM/0247
Date of REC Opinion
2 Nov 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion