Evaluating the impact of a ward environment with 20 single occupancy rooms and two four-bedded bays on patient and staff experiences and outcomes in an acute NHS Trust: a mixed-methods study protocol.

Traditionally, wards in acute care hospitals consist predominately of multioccupancy bays with some single rooms. There is an increasing global trend towards a higher proportion of single rooms in hospitals, with the UK National Health Service (NHS) advocating for single-room provision in all new hospital builds. There is limited evidence on the impact of a ward environment incorporating mostly single and some multioccupancy bays on patient care and organisational outcomes. This study will assess the impact of a newly designed 28-bedded ward environment, with 20 single rooms and two four-bedded bays, on patient and staff experiences and outcomes in an acute NHS Trust in East England. The study is divided into two work packages (WP)-WP1 is a quantitative data extraction of routinely collected patient and staff data while WP2 is a mixed-methods process evaluation consisting of one-to-one, in-depth, semistructured interviews with staff, qualitative observations of work processes on the ward and a quantitative data evaluation of routinely collected process evaluation data from patients and staff. Ethical approval was obtained from the UK Health Research Authority (IRAS ID: 334395). Study findings will be shared with key stakeholders, published in peer-reviewed high-impact journals and presented at relevant conferences.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Competing interests: This study is funded by James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and some members of the research team namely ES, HA, HH, JC and PM are Trust employees with whom Staffordshire University team collaborated to facilitate data collection and access. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.