6th UK and Ireland Implementation Science Research Conference 2023
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PRESENter
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Biography
Helen is a PhD student at Kingston University in London. After qualifying as a physiotherapist in 2003, Helen worked clinically, both within the NHS and voluntary sector, developing a passion for working with patients with neurological conditions with the community environment. Following the completion of her MSc in Rehabilitation in 2017, Helen moved into a Research Assistant role, with a focus on evaluating intervention impact.
In 2020, Helen started her PhD research, funded by Health Education England. Her research focuses on the sustainability of a self-management approach, Bridges, which provides training and support for healthcare practitioners enabling them to build self-management support into their everyday work with patients. She aims to investigate how services continue to use and embed the Bridges approach several years after initial training and implementation.
background
Sustained use of an evidence-based intervention ensures maximal long-term and ongoing benefits for patients and services from the initial investment of time and money. Supporting self-management has been recognised as an essential component of healthcare, with an established evidence-base demonstrating effectiveness in improving clinical outcomes and patient experience . Despite a growing body of evidence exploring the implementation of self-management interventions, there is a paucity in research around the sustainability of these interventions. This scoping review aims to identify and map the evidence available on the sustainability of self-management interventions implemented within adult healthcare services.
MEthod
A database search was run in Medline, Embase, CINAHL, AMED and PsycInfo, alongside a grey literature search. The search terms were kept deliberately broad due to recognised difficulties in defining the key concepts of self-management and sustainability. Studies considering the long-term effectiveness of interventions were initially included. Multiple stages of selection and extraction enabled detailed exploration of how sustainability is captured and considered.
results
596 articles met the broad inclusion criteria, with 497 of these reporting on the long-term effectiveness of interventions. The remaining 99 articles considered the sustained implementation of a self-management intervention. The depth to which sustainability was included or reported on varied greatly. Only a small proportion featured sustainability as the primary focus of the study, providing details as to the evaluation methods or determinants of sustainability. A detailed analysis of the findings will be presented at the conference.
Conclusion
The review found a predominance of research focusing on long-term effectiveness and clinical outcomes rather than sustained implementation. A detailed analysis of the papers focused on implementation identifies barriers and facilitators to sustainability, highlights gaps in the literature and provides a base for future evaluations to work from.