An evaluation of intermediate care in the community

This study is a result of one not-for-profit organization’s aim to develop and evaluate a new approach to intermediate care (IC) by drawing together three separate enterprises; a not-for-profit charitable organization, a primary health care trust and local referring hospitals and social care providers in order to design a new service. This research describes and examines the factors that influenced the success (or not) of this IC service during its first two years of functioning.Using a single descriptive case study a detailed account of the innovation journey that a multidisciplinary team (MDT) underwent as they developed and implemented their own unique model of person-centred intermediate care (PCIC) within a community based nursing home facility is provided. The study describes the workings of the unit and details the service users’ outcomes and their perceptions of the care that they received on this unit.Through the use of a mixed methods, concurrent triangulation, design quantitative data (i.e. assessments of functional ability and length of stay (n= 94)) and qualitative data (i.e. semi-structured interviews-staff (n=12), service users (n=94)) were collected in order to generate thick description which allowed for an in-depth explanation of how a new event (PCIC in a nursing home) was integrated into the culture of the facility. This design allowed the data, once analysed, to be discussed from different viewpoints in order to simultaneously address the confirmatory and exploratory aims of the study. The results of this research provide the field of IC and the practice community with a detailed account of the successes and challenges that one MDT’s experiences during their innovation journey whilst crafting and successfully implementing PCIC within a community based nursing home facility. This study also exposed the staff’s use of emotional labour in order to successfully deliver their model of PCIC