Evaluation

What we've found is that in the months when we were planning and thinking about implementing Safewards, our conflict and containment figures seem to have reduced dramatically. Are other areas finding this? Seems to be a sort of "thinking about change brings about change" effect. This presumably will skew the results when we come to evaluate the post-safewards stats?
Any suggestions? Advice?

mmm. This has been reported in research before, but I have never been able to show this happening in my own research. What are you using as your outcome measure, Sian? Rates go up and down quite a bit naturally. How long have you been counting things? Maybe you started just as things were naturally declining, and they'll go back up a bit. If you tell me what evaluation strategy you are using, I might be able to give you better advice.

Len

We're simply counting incidents for our Pre- stats - we keep extensive records of RPI and seclusion, and are going back to April 2013 for these figures. We're also going to try and pull out incident reports for absconsions and self harm and aggressive incidents with no RPI for the same period. For our Post-implementation we will count the same incidents but also plan to use an assessment scales, and thought it would make sense to take your advice on which tools?
Sian

Depends on what you want to assess.

Are you thinking of a one off assessment of the ward in some way, like the Ward Atmosphere Scale for example. It's been widely used but it is also widely hated by the staff we've asked to complete it, as it requires yes or no answers and the questions are rather dated. There might be other ones we could think of. I know there was one developed in Sweden by Anna Bjorkdahl which is closely related in some ways to the Safewards model. That might be an option, and it is short!

Len

Thanks for this - I love her article "The Bulldozer and the ballet dancer" . Are you thinking of the Broset Violence Checklist?
Sian

I mean the E13 (if she still calls it that). I have an imperfectly translated English version from 2010, and I know Anna has used it and published results, so you would have something to compare it to. If that is what you wanted to do.

However taking a questionnaire after introducing Safewards, without a before questionnaire, is of questionable value, as you can't say whetehr things have improved or not. Unless you have some other goal in mind.

Len