PDSA of the month: Testing out how to collect your project data

By Emma Binley, QI Lead for Newham & Children’s Services 

The Coborn Centre for Adolescent Mental Health is currently running a QI project within the team who work on their Psychiatric Intensive Care (PICU) ward. Their project is focusing on reducing the number of incidents of physical aggression. Since the project first began, data collection has been problematic and the team has attempted to collect data in multiple different ways. The team found that when looking at the number of incidents happening across the PICU as a whole, there appeared to be a frequent spike in the data each time a new young person was admitted/transferred to the ward.

More recently the team decided to start using hourly safety crosses to document incidents of physical aggression, near miss incidents and incident free days. They are running PDSA cycles to find out whether safety crosses are a useful and/or preferred tool for recording incidents. The team are now on their second PDSA cycle and they are hoping that their PDSA cycles will provide them with information on the following:

• Staff members understanding of the safety cross, why they are using it and how to use it.
• If any amendments need to be made to the operational definitions of the colours and/or if any changes need to be made to the cross itself.

This is a fantastic example of how PDSA cycles can be used to test out how teams will collect data before beginning testing out any change ideas.