#WardSonar report published

Today we publish our @NIHRresearch report on #WardSonar the 1st attempt to ask patients on acute mental health wards to measure and report changes in perceptions of safety in real-time. The details of which can be found here. We have deepened our understanding of the co-design of digital interventions, explored milieu and contagion, and been able to understand the benefits and challenges of real-time safety monitoring.

We examined previous researcher’s attempts to involve patients in the design and development of mental health research on acute mental health wards.

We explored milieu and contagion, and how staff as well and patients perceive this. We continue to underestimate the impact of environment/milieu on wards.

We co-designed a digital intervention with staff & patients. #WardSonar was deployed on a number of wards, our researchers collected our data, observed and interviewed patients and staff about #WardSonar to understand how to implement technology onto wards in a more robust way.

We looked at similarities and differences in what patients and staff thought about #WardSonar’s potential to make wards safer.

We learnt about how to develop digital interventions for clinical environments, and made recommendations about how to implement them on wards in the future.

We reported our main findings (under review) which suggest when patients tell you the ward is becoming unsafe incidents are more likely to happen in the next 4 hours.

Patients could also anonymously suggest what was making things unsafe e.g. other patients, staff or the environment. The challenge remains, getting staff to use real-time data to become more pro-active thereby preventing incidents, the very thing my very 1st paper focused on 25 years ago…Thanks to the team, staff and patients involved, particularly during Covid. We need to build on this work to examine the implementation of co-designed (not imposed) technologies on wards to make them safer.

Citation: Baker J, Kendal S, Bojke C, Louch G, Halligan D, Shafiq S, et al. A service-user digital intervention to collect real-time safety information on acute, adult mental health wards: the WardSonar mixed-methods study. Health Soc Care Deliv Res 2024;12(14) https://doi.org/10.3310/UDBQ8402