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This project aims to provide a new service within the stroke care pathway at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals that improves the quality, safety and efficiency of care.
Partners: Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, The University of Sheffield, Sensory Technologies
Team: Joe Langley and Chris Redford
Background
The Sheffield Community Stroke Service (CSS) at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust delivers home based rehabilitation to people who have had a stroke and wants to develop a new Specialist Rehabilitation Assistant (Band 4) role. This new post would involve carrying out assessment and therapy tasks with patients who have had a mild stroke, whilst being directed in real time by a registered therapist who would have traditionally undertaken the role.
At the same time, the service is planning to introduce new technology – Sensory Technologies eShift® – which aims to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care within the stroke pathway.
The team need to design a new service pathway accommodating this new technology and new ways of working. They need to identify how the team roles will be re-structured, skills and competencies gaps for the staff, procedures and protocols for the safety of patients and staff in these new ways of working, technology integration, training and familiarisation and a whole raft of other details.
Methods
Lab4Living’s role in this is to lead a Co-Design process for the whole team with patients to ensure that the new pathway meets the needs of all who will be affected by it. This new project will be evaluated by a team at the University of Sheffield led by Dr Steven Ariss.
Pre-COVID, we ran a series of face-to-face workshops, mapped the current service, mapped their ideal, new service, created personas of the new role to deliver the service, identified the skills and competencies gaps for this role and developed a training program. We co-designed ‘pocket prompts’ (handy, discrete pocket-sized reminders of the protocols to follow when out on-the-job). We also developed an inclusion/exclusion criterion and co-designed this into a referral checklist prompt for referring clinicians to support accurate referrals into this new pathway.
It is embedded entirely within Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and as COVID hit, they were forced to pause all non-COVID related research and innovation. The project is just about to re-start.
COVID Adaptation
COVID put a pause on this activity. Our key partner in this has been Sheffield Teaching Hospitals.The project is embedded entirely within Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and as COVID hit, they were forced to pause all non-COVID related research and innovation, to meet the clinical challenges of managing COVID cases. This project has therefore been paused for 12 months and is about to re-start in June 2021.
Outputs
For more information on the project see the project report