Team interventions in acute hospital contexts: protocol for the evaluation of an initial programme theory using...

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Team Dynamics
• Quality Improvement

Background:

• Existing research on healthcare interventions prioritizes patient outcomes over team experiences.
• There's a gap in understanding why interventions succeed or fail, particularly concerning the delivering team and context.
• Effective implementation requires understanding the perspectives of multi-disciplinary healthcare teams.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore enablers and barriers impacting multi-disciplinary healthcare team interventions.
• To evaluate existing programme theories using a realist evaluation approach.
• To understand 'what worked for whom, in what conditions, why, to what extent, and how?' within acute hospital settings.

Main Methods:

• A realist evaluation framework will be applied to two case studies of multi-disciplinary acute hospital team interventions.
• Case Study 1: Theory-based interviewing. Case Study 2: Secondary analysis of semi-structured interview transcripts.
• Iterative data interrogation within and across contexts to identify influential contextual factors and synthesize findings into middle-range theories.

Main Results:

• Identified contextual characteristics and resources that influenced the effectiveness of team interventions.
• Examined patterns and variations in multi-disciplinary team intervention delivery and outcomes.
• Synthesized cross-contextual data to develop more generalizable insights into intervention success.

Conclusions:

• Understanding the team's perspective and the specific context is vital for successful healthcare interventions.
• Realist evaluation provides a robust framework for uncovering the complex mechanisms of intervention effectiveness.
• Findings contribute to developing more effective and sustainable multi-disciplinary team interventions in acute care.