Feasibility of a Digital Intervention for Patients Frequently Admitted to Psychiatric Acute Wards

This qualitative feasibility study investigates a digital health app designed for patients who are frequently admitted to the psychiatric acute ward, to facilitate crisis support outside of office hours to avoid unnecessary readmissions, as well as self-harm. As this is a novel app to be implemented in an already existing service, key uncertainties regarding the intervention content and its delivery needs to be addressed before potentially conducting a full-scale trial, or, alternatively, to inform further intervention refinement. Such uncertainties are appropriate to explore in a feasibility study according to the Medical Research Council (MRC) framework for the development and evaluation of complex interventions.

There is a need to investigate whether the app is acceptable and useful to the patients using it, and to the healthcare providers who respond to it. There is also a need to know whether the healthcare providers responding to the app find the task manageable. The context in which the staff are to deliver the intervention, i.e. the in-bed ward, may be subject to different barriers, such as a staff shortage due to sick leave and heavy workload in the ward. Such barriers are essential to identify ahead of possible future trials in other contexts.