Publications by authors named "Natalie Sanford"

Article Synopsis
  • - There is a push within NHS maternity services to enhance open disclosure for families affected by harm, yet there is limited guidance on achieving this improvement.
  • - The study employs a three-phase qualitative approach to identify key factors for better open disclosure from the perspectives of families and healthcare providers, and aims to create practical recommendations for service enhancement.
  • - Findings reveal a shift towards recognizing harmed families as active participants in learning from incidents, but still highlight a need for actionable strategies and effective interventions to support open disclosure in maternity settings.
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The effectiveness of healthcare depends on successful teamwork. Current understanding of teamwork in healthcare is limited due to the complexity of the context, variety of team structures, and unique demands of healthcare work. This qualitative study aimed to identify different types of healthcare teams based on their structure, membership, and function.

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Background: Poor handovers between hospital and primary care threaten safe discharges, with elderly and frail patients most at risk of harm. Using Behavioural Science we explored influences and identified relevant behaviour change techniques (BCTs) to improve written handovers and safety during discharge.

Methods: We conducted two qualitative studies: (1) ethnographic observations (>80 h) collected by five researchers in five purposively sampled clinical areas of a London teaching hospital, investigating routine work and interactions of hospital staff involved in discharges; and (2) 12 semi-structured interviews with hospital staff involved in discharge exploring influences on preparations of written handovers.

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Background: Open Disclosure (OD) is open and timely communication about harmful events arising from health care with those affected. It is an entitlement of service-users and an aspect of their recovery, as well as an important dimension of service safety improvement. Recently, OD in maternity care in the English National Health Service has become a pressing public issue, with policymakers promoting multiple interventions to manage the financial and reputational costs of communication failures.

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Objective: To examine the impact of nursing team size and composition on inpatient hospital mortality.

Design: A retrospective longitudinal study using linked nursing staff rostering and patient data. Multilevel conditional logistic regression models with adjustment for patient characteristics, day and time-invariant ward differences estimated the association between inpatient mortality and staffing at the ward-day level.

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Background: Resilient Healthcare research centres on understanding and improving quality and safety in healthcare. The Concepts for Applying Resilience Engineering (CARE) model highlights the relationships between demand, capacity, work-as-done, work-as-imagined, and outcomes, all of which are central aspects of Resilient Healthcare theory. However, detailed descriptions of the nature of misalignments and the mechanisms used to adapt to them are still unknown.

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Healthcare workers must balance competing priorities to deliver high-quality patient care. Rasmussen's Dynamic Safety Model proposed three factors that organisations must balance to maintain acceptable performance, but there has been little empirical exploration of these ideas, and little is known about the risk trade-offs workers make in practice. The aim of this study was to investigate the different pressures that healthcare workers experience, what risk trade-off decisions they make in response to pressures, and to analyse the implications for quality and safety.

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