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Inpatient Quality and Safety

Between 2022-2024 all inpatient wards from across the trust came together to improve quality and safety. Teams from across every part of the trust are working to make wards a more therapeutic place for service users to be. A therapeutic environment, with meaningful engagement can have positive effects for both staff and service users. An important part of this work is focusing on improving the completion of mental health observations in order to keep service users safe.

Therapeutic Engagement and Observations

Teams from all inpatient units across the trust spent 18 months working to make wards a more therapeutic place for service users to be. A therapeutic environment, with meaningful engagement, can have positive effects for both staff and service users. An important part of this work is focusing on improving the completion of mental health observations in order to keep service users safe.

Teams were supported to develop and test local change ideas, with staff and service users picking three to test across the trust at scale. The three main change ideas were (please bullet point the list):

A board relay, where staff hand over a physical board with observation documentation
Zonal observations, where nursing staff are assigned a zone to engage with service users
The use of Life Skills recovery workers on Twilight shifts (2 – 10pm) to conduct therapeutic activities with service users.

These three ideas have been scaled across the trust, with improvements seen across a range of measures of violence and restrictive practice.

You can hear from staff who have been testing these ideas by watching the video below

ELFT Safety Culture Bundle

In working to strengthen the use of the safety culture bundle, teams are building on the success of work to reduce violence on inpatient wards carried out between 2014-2019 at ELFT. The bundle is made up of four parts: the safety cross, safety huddle, community meetings and the Brosset Violence checklist. You can find out more by visiting the Violence Reduction page.