Improving the efficiency and person-centredness of occupational therapy input into care-plans in a forensic mental health and rehabilitation service

Abstract

Care-planning is vital to the delivery of timely, person-centred, safe and effective care. Despite the understanding of the benefits of person-centred care-plan in both services, occupational therapists (OTs) within our forensic and rehabilitation services had difficulties in inputting into patient care-plan an efficient and person-centred manner.The OT team developed a Quality Improvement (QI) project to improve the efficiency of the OT process to create more time for care-planning and improve person-centredness of OT input into care-plans to 82% in the forensic services and rehabilitation services by December 2023.The results indicated an increase in the person-centredness of care-plans from 63.64% to 84.34% within the rehabilitation service and an increase from 65.15% to 95.45% in the forensic service. This project used feedback from patients to develop our input into care-plans. The project also increased the efficiency of the admission process and released time to be spent on care-planning and treatment.We improved the quality of our input to care-plans in a sustainable way by using the Royal Academy of Improvement sustainability measure and taking actions which included training our band 6 and 7 OTs to complete their monthly audit and reporting this as part of the head of nursing report for assurance in our monthly Clinical and Operational Assurance Team meetings. These actions ensured that our project fitted with the organisation’s strategic aims and values. We also used low carbon alternatives by holding most of our improvement meetings online and eliminating the use of paper.Lastly, we improved the generalisability of this project by using the Goal Directed Care Plan audit tool, which is a well-researched, evidence-based tool created by service-users, carers and members of staff. This was used to train members of staff and develop an example of a person-centred input into care-plans to improve their practice.