HS&DR - 08/1819/214: The Impact of Enhancing the Effectiveness of Interdisciplinary Working

Why are we asking for your actionable tools?

A project is being carried out at Sheffield Hallam University in conjunction with colleagues from CLAHRC YH, and is funded by NHS England to develop an online repository for actionable tools for active dissemination and implementation of research findings into practice. They are currently working with knowledge mobilisation experts linked to CLAHRC YH, NHS England,  practitioners and those responsible for professional development to derive a working definition of 'actionable tools', and are seeking out research outputs which could potentially be actionable tools. They will consult a governance team with end-user representation, to determine which candidate tools fulfil the criteria to be considered 'actionable' and hence can be included on the online repository.

The RAT Group have put forward some NIHR funded research outputs to be included.:

This paper is firmly directed at application of the principles: The ten principles of good interdisciplinary team practice.

The following is a resource that has been designed and used as an actionable tool:

InterdisciplinaryManagement Tool - Workbook (this is appendix #2 on the project page).

We have published an evaluation of the implementation of the tool:

Qualitative evaluation of the implementation of the Interdisciplinary Management Tool: A reflective tool to enhance interdisciplinary team work using Structured Facilitated Action Research for Implementation (SaFARI)

This project:

Secondary analysis and literature review of community rehabilitation and intermediate care: an information resource

Has a full report in the NIHR journals library.

Here are the chapters:

• Objective 1. To identify those patients most likely to benefit from intermediate care and those who would be best placed to receive care elsewhere
• Chapter 1. Which patients are most or least likely to benefit from intermediate care?
• Chapter 2. What factors are associated with increased hospital admissions for patients using intermediate care services? 
• Chapter 3. Factors predicting admission to institutional care among intermediate care service users 
• Chapter 4. What factors are associated with increased risk of mortality for intermediate care patients? 
• Objective 2. To examine the effectiveness of different models of intermediate care
• Chapter 5. What team-level factors are associated with the greatest benefits for patients in terms of health status? 
• Chapter 6. What is the cost-effectiveness of different models of care? 
• Objective 3. To explore the differences between intermediate care service configurations and how they have changed over time
• Chapter 7. How have intermediate care services changed over time? 
• Chapter 8. How have referral patterns changed over time and what is the relationship with patient outcomes? 
• Objective 4. Service toolkit
• Chapter 9. Development of a service toolkit to guide providers and commissioners of services

Each of these could provide evidence to inform actions for commissioners and service providers.

Notably, the NHS Benchmarking Network, National Audit of Intermediate Care (NAIC) (currently in its 5th year) has been using some of the recommendations from Objective 4 (especially the Therapy Outcome Measures), and automated data collection methods, which were pioneered as a result of continuation of this work.