Daisy Halligan
University of Leeds
In the name of safety: Identifying, understanding, and stopping low-value safety practices (project complete)
Background
Healthcare systems like the NHS are facing a shortage of resources, yet evidence suggests that as much as 30% of healthcare spending is wasted.
Recent research has sought to minimise waste by exploring the removal of healthcare technologies and practices that offer little or no benefit. To date, much of that research has focused on identifying and removing ineffective clinical practices. But less research has explored the potential to remove non-clinical safety practices don’t actually improve safety.
This study will use a bottom-up approach to identify non-clinical safety practices used in hospitals that could be removed because they have little to no benefit on safety.
Approach
The project will use crowdsourcing to obtain ideas from a large variety of healthcare staff.
Questionnaires will be distributed to healthcare staff at Bradford Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust and circulated via social media. The questionnaires will ask participants to describe one safety practice in the NHS which they believe does not contribute to patient safety.
Following data collection, the project will identify a low-value safety practice and use behaviour change theory and stakeholder input to develop an intervention to support healthcare staff in stopping that practice.
Daisy gave a lightning talk about her research project at our 2020 annual event, THIS Space.
Research Articles
Halligan, D. et al. (2023) Identifying Safety Practices Perceived as Low Value: An Exploratory Survey of Healthcare Staff in the United Kingdom and Australia. Journal of Patient Safety.