The effect of environment on the care of older people with confusion

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  The effect of the environment on the care of older people with confusion and other forms of cognitive impairments in acute general hospital settings

• IRAS ID

  228821

• Contact name

  B A Keenan

• Contact email

  bernie.keenan@bcu.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Stirling

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 5 months, 29 days

• Research summary

  The project focus is the care of people with confusion in acute hospital settings and involves a comparison between a specially designed ward and a general medical ward at the University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust.The research questions are;
  1, Does a dementia friendly physical environment improve service user outcomes?
  2, Does a dementia friendly physical environment influence the social environment of care and facilitate person centred care practice?.
  The study will comprise a convenience sample of 60 people on each ward over the age of 65 years with some form of cognitive impairment for the observational, case note and Trust informatics data. In addition a purposive sample of 10 ward staff will be selected for semi-structured interviews in each ward area. Data already routinely collected within the Trust will also be analysed to evaluate perceived differences in quality of care and patient outcomes, these include;length of stay, discharge destination, readmission rates, and rates of falls on the specific wards under investigation to compare differences in outcomes between the purpose built environment and the standard medical ward. This will also include the use of the results from the Trust’s Person, Interaction and Environment tool (PIE) observations (Royal College of psychiatrists 2011), which attempts to measure the quality of patient/carer contacts. In addition the study will also incorporate the anonymised findings from the Trust user satisfaction questionnaires and via the Person, Interaction and Environment tool (PIE) ( Royal College of Psychiatrists 2011) data collected as part of the audit process.to assist in denoting differences in levels of satisfaction between the specific wards under investigation. As all this information has already been collected it will involve no additional inconvenience to patients or staff.

  References
  Royal College of Psychiatrists (2011). Report of the National Audit of Dementia Care in General Hospitals. Editors: Young J, Hood C, Wooley R, Gandesha A and Souza R. London: Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership

• REC name

  West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  17/WM/0400

• Date of REC Opinion

  29 Dec 2017

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion