WORKSTREAM

Delivery of partnership projects

To provide robust evidence about interventions, service delivery models and other processes designed to improve recruitment, retention, staff wellbeing and job satisfaction in the same day and urgent care workforce.

Our research will be informed by conceptual frameworks of the quadruple aims of health care systems: improve population health; enhance the patient experience of care; reduce the per capita cost; and improve the work life of health care providers. Our evaluation framework will be based on overarching criteria of quality in health care: Acceptability, equity, clinical safety, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This evaluative structure aligns with a comprehensive view of the healthcare workforce and the driving forces affecting workforce supply and demand.

We plan to address same day and urgent care workforce issues using various methods, including mixed-methods approaches. Realist Evaluation is of particular benefit in aiding our understanding of how and why different contextual factors impact outcomes (intended and unintended). Service-level stakeholders value these methods, appreciating the focus on context to help inform ‘real-world’ decision-making in a rapidly changing landscape.

Realist evaluation is a theory-driven approach to understanding complex interventions in complex environments. It seeks to understand what works, for whom, in what circumstances, how, and why. The approach is methodologically robust, systematic, and facilitates a clear understanding of the interactions between context and mechanisms that influence the outcomes of interventions. This approach is well suited to study the complex factors (i.e., causes and solutions) for optimising the same day and urgent care workforce. However, this will not be the exclusive methodology employed across the different research studies. The partnership team will determine the most relevant methods for each study on a case-by-case basis