23 August 2021

Two completed Quality Improvement (QI) projects from St Charles Hospital were published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

St Charles Hospital is an inpatient mental health centre and helps a number of patients with varying and complex needs.

One of the QI projects from St Charles Hospital was part of CNWL’s QI central programme, focusing on reducing violent incidents on wards in a non-restrictive way.

CNWL’s QI Board create central programmes to focus on key areas where the Trust can improve, between 2019 – 2020 one of those was violence reduction; Nile Ward at St Charles Hospital, along with other inpatient wards, was nominated to take part.

Using QI methodologies, the Nile Ward team established and measured different initiatives that could help reduce violent incidents, for example, starting gardening sessions for patients and creating a set of mutual expectations written by patients and staff for both to follow.

Nile Ward managed to reduce violent incidents by 43% between December 2019 – December 2020.

Dr Mehtab Rahman, Consultant Psychiatrist said, “We hope that our QI project can be used as an example to show how QI methodology can enable violence reduction within mental health services.”

To view Nile Ward’s full article in the British Journal of Psychiatry click here.

The second QI project looked into increasing the number of patients receiving a physical health assessment.

Patients with a serious mental illness are more likely to suffer with their physical health and routine assessments can help establish helpful interventions and improve wellbeing.

The team checked patients’ weight, smoking status, alcohol intake, substance use, blood pressure, cholesterol level and gave a diabetes assessment.

By September 2020 physical health assessments across 8 wards increased to 89%.

To view the full article on physical health assessments at St Charles Hospital click here.