Project Lead: Professor Jackie Bridges, Professor of Older People's Care
What is it?
In CLECC, all staff from participating teams attend whole team learning activities (which may be in the form of a study day), with a focus on team building and understanding colleagues’ and patients’ experiences. Then a senior nurse educator supports the team to try new ways of working in the team, including regular supportive discussions on supporting each other and improving care. Each team manager attends action learning groups to develop their compassionate care leadership role. Two team members receive additional training in doing observations of care and feeding back to colleagues.
What did we do?
We piloted CLECC with nursing teams on four wards in two English hospitals, with two other wards continuing with business as usual. We interviewed staff, and observed CLECC activities, to help us understand if it can be easily put into practice and if changes are needed in future. We also tested evaluation methods, including ways to measure compassion, and making sure we could recruit enough older patients in a future study. We included a third English hospital in a follow-up project and have also piloted CLECC in an in-patient mental health setting.
What did we find?
We found that CLECC can be made to work with nursing teams on NHS general hospital wards and that staff felt it improved their capacity to be compassionate. We also learned that we could improve CLECC to help staff carry on using it, by, for example, helping senior nurses to understand their role in supporting staff to use CLECC. Our findings also highlight the value of making sure that teams are ready for programmes like CLECC before it is implemented.
Update
We are finalising a CLECC toolkit for organisations and teams interested in using it to make improvements.
For more information please contact Jackie.bridges@soton.ac.uk
Professor Jackie Bridges' programme of work focuses on the organisation and delivery of health care to older people with complex needs. She leads a major programme of research focused on professional work and organisational change related to older people's care, and steers the development and delivery of associated educational provision within Health Sciences. Jackie leads the Ageing and Dementia research group and is an investigator for NIHR ARC Wessex, helping to lead the ARC Ageing and Dementia work in Wessex and nationally.