Hi, I was having a look at some of the powerpoint Safeguard presentations and was trying to understand the MAIN OUTCOMES slide where there is a 14.6% conflict reduction and 23.6% containment reduction.

I will try and describe it.

2 lots of data on the one graph, Conflict measure on top: experiment & control, Containment on bottom: experiment & control.

If this is the case...

It looks like the control was also significant in reducing conflict?
Conflict also got worse during the Safewards Implementation?
Containment, not so much...

Help Please

Your understanding of the graph is correct.

Conflict on the control wards did go down, but that is why you have control wards. To control for trends over time and for the effect of taking part in an experiment. And we deliberately sought to elicit a placebo effect by not telling the control wards that their intervention was not expected to have any impact.

What is important is that conflict declined much more on the experimental wards. In fact, 15% more. Hence the declared result.

The difference for containment only looks smaller because we crammed the results onto the same graph. The rate of containment is lower than the rate of conflict. The proportional decrease in containment of the experimental wards relative to the controls was larger than that for conflict.

Len

Thanks for that!
I think the control measures made for a coherent alternative! Were the 2 projects both called Safewards, or did they have a more anonymous codename?

Steve

The whole trial was called Safewards, and we gave the interventions bland names. The experimental intervention (what is now the safewards ten interventions) were called 'organisational interventions', and the control interventions called 'wellbeing interventions'.

A full account will be being published soon.

Len