Week 2 - Ethics Approval

So this week I have received HRA ethics approval and have now applied for ethics approval from UHS NHS Trust. Thereafter I will need to apply for ethics approval from the University of Southampton. Once I have received this I will be able to proceed with the request for data from the National Patient Safety Agency on the reported incidents of patient incidents over the last 10 years. The review of this data will be the first step in researching the level of harm caused by backlog maintenance.

Other than the milestone above I have been working on the literature review, analysing articles on the subject of Systems Dynamics - both the soft and hard approaches. The use of systems dynamics will be used to map out key infrastructure systems within an acute healthcare environment and allow the research to theorise what the effect of reduced / no maintenance or lifecycle replacement will have on the wider system and whether it increases the potential for patient harm.

Next week is likely to be more of the same… perhaps.