A qualitative study of organisational resilience in care homes in Scotland.

Providing care for the dependent older person is complex and there have been persistent concerns about care quality as well as a growing recognition of the need for systems approaches to improvement. The I-SCOPE (Improving Systems of Care for the Older person) project employed Resilient Healthcare (RHC) theory and the CARE (Concepts for Applying Resilience) Model to study how care organisations adapt to complexity in everyday work, with the aim of exploring how to support resilient performance. The project was an in-depth qualitative study across multiple sites over 24 months.

Exploring and developing student midwives' experiences (ESME)-An appreciative inquiry study.

Background: There is increased focus on investing in midwifery students as our future workforce. Inquiring into what helps to support an enriched learning experience for student midwives in clinical placements is timely.

Aim: To work collaboratively with key stakeholders (student midwives, midwives) in clinical placements to generate an experience-based understanding of what works well in relation to the student midwife experience and from this understanding, co-create ways to enhance students' experiences.

Caring for older people with dementia in the emergency department.

Background: Admission to an emergency department (ED) may expose the older person with dementia to a range of negative consequences, including a deterioration in their behavioural symptoms. The authors conducted a review of primary research relating to the experiences of older people with dementia, their carers and ED nurses, to understand how these experiences might inform nursing practice.

Methods: Integrative review with a search of the electronic databases of Medline, CINAHL and PSYCHINFO using specified inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Caring for an older person with dementia in the Emergency Department (ED): An Appreciative Inquiry exploring family member and ED nurse experiences.

Aims And Objectives: To generate insights about what matters and is valued by family members of older people with dementia in the emergency department. To explore the experiences of emergency nurses looking after older people with dementia in an episode of care.

Background: In the emergency department, older people with dementia are at risk of suboptimal care.

Implementation of a Complex Intervention to Support Leadership Development in Nursing Homes: A Multimethod Participatory Study.

Leadership is key to quality improvement in nursing homes. This article reports on the initial analysis of the transformational My Home Life Leadership Support program for nursing home managers being implemented in Scotland. It analyses learning from a multimethod participatory descriptive study.

Developing Caring Conversations in care homes: an appreciative inquiry.

Relationship-centred practice is key to delivering quality care in care homes. Evidence is strong about the centrality of human interaction in developing relationships that promote dignity and compassion. The Caring Conversations framework is a framework for delivering compassionate care based on human interactions that was developed in the acute healthcare setting.

Nurse's perceptions of organisational barriers to delivering compassionate care: A qualitative study.

Background: Compassionate care is an international priority of healthcare professionals. There is little understanding about how workplace issues impact provision of compassionate care in nursing practice. Therefore, it is important to address the workplace issues and organizational factors which may hinder compassionate care delivery within nursing practice.

Appreciative Inquiry as an intervention to change nursing practice in in-patient settings: An integrative review.

Background: High profile accounts of failures in patient care reflect an urgent need for transformational development in healthcare. Appreciative Inquiry is promoted as an approach to exploring and bringing about change in social systems. Appreciative Inquiry has been used extensively in North American business since the late 1980s.

Strategies for Enhancing "Person Knowledge" in an Older People Care Setting.

This article presents findings from a study about compassionate care-the development of person knowledge in a medical ward caring for older people. Appreciative inquiry, an approach to research that focuses on discovering what works well and implementing strategies to help these aspects happen most of the time, was used. Staff, patients, and families participated in this study, which used a range of methods to generate data including interviews and observations.

Compassionate Care: Student nurses' learning through reflection and the use of story.

Introduction: Current concern in health care about delivering care that is compassionate has important implications for how compassion is taught and made explicit in nurse education curricula. This paper will describe the use of stories within the curricula to enhance knowledge and skills in compassionate caring.

Methodology: The Leadership in Compassionate Care Programme (LCCP) was a 3-year action research project that sought to capture what compassionate care means within practice and utilise this learning within education.

Supporting the development of interpersonal skills in nursing, in an undergraduate mental health curriculum: reaching the parts other strategies do not reach through action learning.

The centrality of therapeutic relationships is considered to be the cornerstone of effective mental health nursing practice. Strategies that support the development of these skills and the emotional aspects of learning need to be developed. Action learning is one such strategy.

Developing compassion through a relationship centred appreciative leadership programme.

Background: Recent attention in health care focuses on how to develop effective leaders for the future. Effective leadership is embodied in relationships and should be developed in and with staff and patients. This paper describes development, implementation and evaluation of an appreciative and relationship centred leadership programme carried out with 86 nursing staff covering 24 in-patient areas within one acute NHS Board in Scotland.

Clarifying misconceptions about compassionate care.

Aim: To discuss the meaning of compassionate care as it applies to staff, patients and families in health and social care settings, its application to practice and how organizational infrastructures affect the delivery of care.

Background: The term compassion has assumed headline status and inclusion in current health and social care policy. Clarity of what the term means in practice is needed and may help to promote delivery of compassionate care consistently across health and social care settings.

Cultivating compassionate care. .are.

The term compassion is at the forefront of current healthcare policy, yet its meaning and how it can be realised in practice is far from clear. This article debates the meaning of compassion in the context of practice and argues that it essentially involves how people relate to each other. It highlights key processes to enhance compassion with self, patients and their families, healthcare professionals and the organisation.

Caring about caring: developing a model to implement compassionate relationship centred care in an older people care setting.

Aim: This study actively involved older people, staff and relatives in agreeing a definition of compassionate relationship-centred care and identifying strategies to promote such care in acute hospital settings for older people. It was a major component of a three year programme (the Leadership in Compassionate Care Programme, LCCP) seeking to integrate compassionate care across practice and educational environments.

Background: Compassionate caring and promoting dignity are key priorities for policy, practice and research worldwide, being central to the quality of care for patients and families, and job satisfaction for staff.

Valuing compassion through definition and measurement.

The Leadership in Compassionate Care programme aims to embed compassionate care in practice and education. This article describes a project within the programme that explores with staff, patients and families the meaning of compassion and how this can be measured. The project has involved developing practice statements from noticing the aspects of compassionate care that work well.

Appreciating and developing compassionate care in an acute hospital setting caring for older people.

Background: There is increasing emphasis in policy, research and practice on the importance of caring in health care. Indeed there is much debate about how to enhance the caring cultures within which health care is provided. This paper argues that a proper systematic analysis of caring practice that works well in care environments may help us to move towards a realistic model for the future which supports staff, patients and families to give and receive compassionate care.

Relationship centred outcomes focused on compassionate care for older people within in-patient care settings.

This paper describes outcomes from research titled Leadership in Compassionate Care. The research adopts a participatory action research approach, utilizing appreciative inquiry and relationship centred care. Outcomes of the research are based upon relationships between patients, families and staff.

Barriers to implementing an integrated care pathway for the last days of life in nursing homes.

Aim: this paper explores the barriers that needed to be overcome during the process of implementing an integrated care pathway for the last days of life as a way of developing quality end-of-life care in nursing homes.

Methods: an action research methodology underpinned the study. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected in eight nursing homes before, during and after the implementation of the care pathway.

Beyond tokenistic involvement of older people in research - a framework for future development and understanding.

Research and development work in health and social care are increasingly required to involve users at all stages of the research process yet there is scant empirical evidence to support the justification of this laudable aim. Evidence does suggest that at present efforts to achieve this are primarily tokenistic and that more work is needed, both to examine what user involvement in research activity actually means, and how this can best be supported. This paper sets out to describe developments to support involvement of older people through work at the Royal Bank of Scotland Centre for the Older Person's Agenda and to identify a number of challenges that this has raised for researchers.

Enhancing partnerships with relatives in care settings.

Aim: The aims of this project were to implement guidance that sought to involve carers of older people in decision-making processes, and to promote practice development through work-based learning.

Method: Data were collected and analysed to examine how carer involvement was being managed on the wards. The data were then fed back to staff in each area and meetings were held to discuss which aspects of carer involvement were priorities for them.