Project updates

Hospital data accessed to study SDEC performance

After some administrative delay, we now have access to the data we need for our statistical analyses.

We will provide the first national evaluation of SDEC services in NHS England. Work-package 2a is a study describing trends in health outcomes, both over time and between hospitals. Work-package 2b is cost-consequential study that will describe the policy-level effect of SDEC services on policy outcomes and NHS costs.

Together, both studies will inform our first major report on the impact of SDEC service.

National survey closes submissions

We spent the summer  surveying  type-1 emergency departments in NHS England, asking about their SDEC services.

Promoting the survey involved calling the +350 relevant hospitals in England to find out if they had an SDEC to report on. We are grateful to the kind and patient staff around the country who took the time to complete our online survey.

We are now busy processing the responses to find a meaningful and helpful way to classify SDEC services.

Our team expands

In time with the beginning of our third work package, we'll be welcoming two new qualitative researchers to the team.

Both researchers will support Professor Fiona Sampson with observations of SDEC services around the country, and interviews with patients and staff.

You will be able to find out more about both new researchers on our 'Who we are' page, soon.

Workshop on communication strategy 

In our communications workshop, we developed a clear plan to engage our key audiences effectively throughout the project. This helped us refine our messaging, shape our website and launch our project bulletin. By taking a strategic approach, we ensure our research reaches the right people in meaningful ways.

Read more about what we did.

The public tell us who SDEC patients are

We hosted our first workshop with patients and members of the public to describe the kinds of people best suited to SDEC services. We also met with members of the Deep End Research Alliance (DERA) to collaborate on a project about urgent care hubs.

Key themes were 'life context', 'Need to find out more', and 'Waiting for tests and test results'. Read more about the workshop.

Protocol for our literature review

We published the protocol for our literature review of SDEC services on ORDA, the University of Sheffield's Online Research Data Archive.

Stakeholder group workshop

We hosted our first workshop with representatives of healthcare and social-care services to identify who SDEC services might work well for and why.

Project manger hired

We welcome Ciarán McInerney, PhD, to the team as our project manager. His previous roles included managing the Digital Innovation Theme in the NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Translational Research Centre.

Ciarán is also a research fellow with experience in heath-service research, electronic healthcare records, and performance analysis.

First meeting with our steering group

We met with 11 representatives from the NHS, Royal Colleges, the government, and academia. Our steering group are experts in urgent and emergency medicine, social care, civil service, data analysis, and public policy.

The group helped with our national survey of acute hospital trusts, and helped recruitment to our patient-and-public groups.

Work begins  on the literature review

One of our first task is to compare the definitions, descriptions, and actual use of SDEC services.

We want to clarify and summarise what SDEC services are in the eyes of those who have already used and studied them.