At the European Psychiatric Association’s International Congress 2010, we reported on psychiatric staff confidence regarding emergency medical care in our poster: “How Well Prepared is a Psychiatric Ward for Dealing with a Medical Emergency?”. This work highlighted areas for improvement, including staff confidence and familiarity with equipment. Consequently, several aspects of practice were enhanced, including addressing training shortfalls alongside adopting a uniform layout for emergency trolleys. In order to identify improvement, the process was re-audited with a new qualitative component to gather staff opinion.

Our primary objective was to examine whether our interventions had improved staff confidence with regard emergency medical care. Our secondary objectives included exploring staff attitudes toward delivery of such care and to identify further areas for improvement.

Our primary aim was to evaluate the impact of our interventions on delivery of emergency medical care

Our original questionnaire survey was repeated and the results compared with those obtained previously. Additionally, a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews will be performed with staff to compliment the questionnaires.

Results will be available in February 2011.

Given that psychiatric patients often suffer from significant physical health problems, it is imperative that staff are comfortable in delivering initial emergency medical care. We anticipate our results will demonstrate modest improvement. Clinical governance is an ongoing process, therefore the most important conclusions to be drawn will be our recommendations for future work, which will encompass the next step in our efforts to improve delivery of emergency medical care.