Information for hospital staff who want to know more about participating in our case studies.

Information about participating in our case studies, for people who have used an SDEC or who care for someone who has.

Progress with case studies

Our work compiling case studies from around the country kicked off earlier this year as described in our previous update. We are delighted with the progress so far. We have completed 16 interviews with staff and patients, and undertaken many hours observing SDECs at three hospitals. The thorough and necessary work of gaining approval and consent continues as we expect to recruit eight hospitals overall.

You can find out more about the plans for our case studies by checking out our work-package 3 explainer.

NIHR Urgent and Emergency Care Roundtable

We were invited to present at the NIHR Urgent and Emergency Care Roundtable in June. This collaborative roundtable brought together policymakers, clinicians, and researchers to better understand the gaps between existing evidence and the research required to inform future urgent and emergency care service delivery. Richard presented our early findings, focusing on the results of developing a classification system for SDECs.

Our academic paper about the classification system is currently being reviewed and we hope to share it with you, soon. In the meantime, you can read about why we think a classification system is so useful for SDEC.

Summary of our national survey

We've written before about our national survey of SDEC in England. Its main purpose was to inform our classification system for SDEC. But the message we kept hearing was that the survey results were interesting in their own right, so we have committed to publishing a summary of them. It will discuss the variety of ways that responders told us SDECs were set-up and run, and pose some questions raised by bringing all this information together. 

'What does "SDEC" mean?' now available online

As part of work-package 1, we reviewed what has been published about SDEC and found ourselves asking 'What does "SDEC" mean?'. This is because people use a wide variety of definitions and descriptions when studying SDEC. We've now made our definitional analysis openly available on the Open Science Framework website.

Have you worked in several SDECs? If so, let us know if the obscurity and confusion about the term ‘SDEC' resonates with you and your experience of SDEC.