Time Together: A Multi-site Nursing Intervention Project Using a Single System Experimental Design (TT)

BACKGROUND:

Despite the long known significance of the nurse-patient relationship, research in psychiatric inpatient care still reports on unfulfilled expectations of, and difficulties in interactions and relationships between patients and staff. As one solution to the contemporary circumstances, interventions that creates structures that allow quality interactions between patients and staff are needed.

INTERVENTION TT is an intervention, developed from the intervention Protected Engagement Time. The structure of TT is that staff, for a fixed time during the day, dedicates their time to exclusively engage with the patients. Other duties of more administrative nature, visits and meetings are organized to be performed at other times during the day. This structure will be tested at three psychiatric inpatient care wards in the north of Sweden.

DESIGN AND METHODS An experimental single system design (A-B-Follow-up) will be used. As TT will be introduced as a routine ward activity during the B phase, all patients and staff on the participating wards will be participating in TT. However, participating in the evaluation will be voluntary. Data will be collected through questionnaires once every seventh weekday during 5 weeks for the A phase, and 12 weeks during B phase.

In parallel, a process evaluation will be conducted using semi structured interviews and participating observations.