Parts of this report are based on Stanworth et al.1 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium. You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article content, provided that you credit the author and journal.
Programme overview
This programme is termed Development & Evaluation of Audit and Feedback INterventions to Increase evidence-based Transfusion practice (AFFINITIE).
We aimed to design and evaluate enhanced feedback interventions, within a national blood transfusion audit programme, to reduce the unnecessary use of blood components. Blood for transfusion is a common intervention in hospital practice. Nearly 2 million issues of blood components are recorded across the UK each year.
The research pathway for the AFFINITIE programme is outlined in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1 Research pathway diagram. (Figure not reproduced here; see the original article.)
Text in the following section is reproduced with permission from Hartley et al.2 This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The text below includes minor additions and formatting changes to the original text.
The AFFINITIE programme of research comprised four workstreams that draw on the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) guidance for developing and evaluating complex interventions.3 Our objectives were to:
- develop, pilot and refine two types of feedback intervention – ‘enhanced content’ and ‘enhanced follow-on support’
- evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the two feedback interventions compared with current standard feedback practice
- investigate the processes of delivery, including mechanisms of change, for the evaluated interventions
- develop general implementation recommendations and tools for relevant audit and feedback programmes in the wider NHS.2
Summary of alterations to the programme’s original aims/design
The analysis presented follows the original proposal, and there were no major alterations. We successfully delivered and tested two behaviourally modified interventions alongside the platform of a national audit. The main trial analysis plan followed that described in the programme’s original aims.