Identifying Quality Indicators in Health Visiting Services through Consensus Methods

Health visitors are trained nurses who are responsible for providing a service to all families in their community. In Wales, health visitors deliver the Healthy Child Wales Programme1, which aims to support families with children under 5 years. However, there is not currently a way of assessing the health visiting service to understand whether it is successful.
This study aims to use Group Concept Mapping to generate consensus about what health visitors and their managers think should be included in a tool that measures the quality of the health visiting service.
Group Concept Mapping is a mixed-methods approach that uses a three-stage process to answer the research question:
1. Brainstorming: Participants brainstorm and create statements to finish a sentence. In this study, the sentence will be ‘an indicator of the quality of health visiting services is…’.
2. Sorting: Participants sort the statements generated from stage 1 into piles that make sense to them, they are then asked to give these piles labels.
3. Rating: Participants rate each of the statements on 1-5 Likert scales, based on; importance and impact on service delivery.
Whilst the brainstorming stage must come first, the methodology allows for the sorting and rating phases to take place in either order.
In the present study, workshop participants will complete the brainstorming phase (1) and the rating phase (3) during the workshop and then be invited to complete sorting (2) online at a later stage. Participants joining the study online will be invited to participate in the sorting (2) and rating (3) at the same time.
Participants will be health visitors or health visiting service managers working in Wales. They will be recruited either at the 2nd National Nurse Staffing Conference in Cardiff or online through the FRAIT Community of Practice. The target for recruitment is 8-100 participants2.
The study has received ethical approval from the University of South Wales Faculty of Life Sciences and Education ethics subgroup.