Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Oct 17, 2023
Date Accepted: Feb 19, 2024
Promoting a patient centred understanding of safety in acute mental health wards: Development of a real-time digital monitoring tool.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Acute mental health services report high levels of safety incidents that involve both patients and staff. The potential for patients to be involved in interventions to improve safety within a mental health setting is acknowledged, and there is a need for interventions that proactively seek the patient perspective of safety. Digital technologies may offer opportunities to address this need.
Objective:
This research sought to design and develop a digital real-time monitoring tool (WardSonar) to collect and collate daily information from patients on acute mental health wards about their perceptions of safety. We present the design and development process and underpinning logic model and programme theory.
Methods:
The first stage involved a synthesis of findings from a systematic review and evidence scan, interviews with patients (n=8) and health professionals (n=17) and stakeholder engagement. Cycles of design activities and discussion followed with patients, staff and stakeholder groups, to design and develop the prototype tool.
Results:
We drew on patient safety theory and the concepts of contagion and milieu. The data synthesis, design and development process resulted in three prototype components of the digital monitoring tool (WardSonar) 1) patient recording interface which asks patients to input their perceptions into a tablet computer, to assess how the ward feels, and whether the direction is changing i.e., ‘getting worse’ or ‘getting better’; 2) staff dashboard and functionality to interrogate the data at different levels; and 3) public facing ward interface. The technology is in open source code.
Conclusions:
Recent patient safety policy and research priorities encourage innovative approaches to measuring and monitoring safety. We developed a digital real-time monitoring tool to collect information from patients on acute mental health wards about perceived safety, to support staff to respond and intervene to changes in the clinical environment more proactively.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.