NIHR grant to study impact of implementing the 'Productive Ward'
Glenn Robert, Professor of Healthcare Quality & Innovation at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery, King’s College London has been awarded a £316,995 grant by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Professor Robert will lead a team from King’s, the University of Southampton and the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust to find out whether the Productive Ward programme has been successfully implemented in NHS acute hospitals in England over the ensuing decade.
The Productive Ward programme seeks to: (1) increase the proportion of time nurses spend in direct patient care, (2) improve experience for staff and patients, and (3) make structural changes to the use of ward spaces to improve efficiency in terms of time, effort and money.
In 2006-08, the (then) NHS Institute for Innovation & Improvement developed the programme to empower ward teams to identify areas for improvement by giving staff the information, skills and time they need to regain control of their ward and the care they provide. Modules and toolkits to guide implementation were made available and hospital Trusts could also purchase ‘standard’ or ‘accelerated’ support packages.
In May 2008, the Government invested £50million to support the dissemination and implementation of the Productive Ward in England. This investment was provided based on evidence from early test sites, widespread commitment from nursing leaders and the promise of what Productive Ward might help to achieve across the NHS.
Professor Robert explains: “The Productive Ward focuses on improving ward environments to help nurses spend more time on patient care and to improve levels of safety and efficiency. It was first tried in the NHS in 2006 and most hospitals in England have now used this approach to try to make some or all of their wards work better. However, there is little robust evidence as to its impact and whether there have been any lasting legacies for frontline healthcare staff, patients and carers.
“Our study will also explore how varying times of adoption of the Productive Ward by hospitals over the last decade - and differing local approaches to implementing the programme - have shaped any impacts and/or wider legacies (including, for example, quality improvement capabilities in Trusts and/or nursing leadership development). Our findings will provide important lessons for those who have already implemented the Productive Ward and those who are planning to do so in the future. In addition, the study will explore any wider, unanticipated benefits of implementing the programme that have been unstudied to date.”
The research will start January 2016 and will take 30 months to complete. Further details of the study aims and design are available at www.nets.nihr.ac.uk/projects/hsdr/1315744
The researchers will survey all 160 NHS acute hospitals in England to update an earlier 2009 study to find out whether they are currently, or have previously, used the Productive Ward and, if they have, the way in which they have used it and whether it has worked well.