Implementing new roles in mental health Trusts (phase 2)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
New Roles, New Challenges: Understanding boundary work to support the implementation of new roles in mental health Trusts
IRAS ID
333780
Contact name
Emily Wood (joint Chief Investigator)
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
8984, Research Registry number
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 2 months, days
Research summary
Mental health services in the NHS face a staffing crisis. One answer is to create new roles and change how care is delivered. Previous research has looked at new roles in isolation to decide if they improve care, but this often ignores how the whole team is affected by the changes. New roles mean existing roles also change through “boundary work”, e.g. staff may give up some tasks but spend time supervising others to do them. Service users may get care from larger teams, including new staff with unfamiliar job titles, which may affect continuity of care.
Our aim is to discover how new roles can be introduced successfully. The project has a number of stages, and we have already completed the first two stages. In these we identified which new roles have been introduced into mental health trusts across England, and where and why this is happening, and used this information to develop a model of the different types of new role. We will now study what happens in practice when different types of new roles are introduced. To do this, we will place researchers into mental health teams that have recently introduced new roles and speak to staff, service users and carers about their experiences. We will study 8 different teams, spread across 4 local mental health trusts. The researchers will observe team meetings and other relevant activities, and interview people in the new roles as well as those working with them or managing them. We will also interview and run focus groups with service users and carers about their experiences. We want to find out what has worked well and where there have been difficulties.
We will use the knowledge we develop to generate practical guidance for those managing and planning new roles in mental health trusts.REC name
North of Scotland Research Ethics Committee 1
REC reference
24/NS/0017
Date of REC Opinion
9 Feb 2024
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion