Professor of Healthcare Quality and Safety (University of Leeds) and Deputy Director Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group and theme lead for NIHR Patient Safety Research Collaboration
Email: Jane.O’Hara@bthft.nhs.uk
Tel: 01274 383692
Twitter: @janekohara
Background
Jane O’Hara is Professor of Healthcare Quality and Safety, based within the School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, UK. She is Deputy Director of the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group, and theme lead for the safer systems, cultures and practices within the NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Research Collanoration. Jane also holds a Visiting Professor position at the SHARE Centre for Resilience in Healthcare at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Jane has over a decade of experience leading patient safety research, and a further eight years of applied psychological research prior to that. Her interests include: how to engage patients and families to ensure safe care and support quality and safety improvement; the measurement and monitoring of patient safety; safety theory and resilient healthcare approaches; co-production; and, quality and safety intervention development and testing.
Currently, Jane leads two large grants funded by the NIHR Health Services & Delivery Research programme, and is co-applicant on grants funded by THIS Institute, the Trondheim Foundation and Research Council of Norway, and the NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Health Research.
Research interests
Jane has a broad range of research interests, which centre on the use of theory and robust methods to understand and improve the safety of healthcare. Principal interests include the involvement of patients in patient safety, how we measure quality and patient safety and use this information to improve care, the use of behaviour change approaches to support safety improvement, and the role of individual differences in influencing quality and safety outcomes.
Recent Funding Awarded
2019: NIHR Health Services & Delivery Research. £894,638. Principal Investigator. Patient and family involvement in serious incident investigations: Developing and testing national and local guiding processes.
2017: NIHR Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust/University of Leeds. £3,000,000. Co-applicant and Principal Investigator for Patient Involvement in Patient Safety Theme.
2016: NIHR Programme for Applied Health Research. £ 2,400,000. Co-applicant and Workstream Lead. Partners at Care Transitions (PACT): Improving Patient Experience and Safety at Transitions of Care.
2016: HEE Yorkshire and Humber. £ 39,500. Principal Investigator. Using patient feedback about the safety of care to support interprofessional education.
2015: NIHR Health Services & Delivery Research. £375,000. Co-applicant. Understanding and enhancing how hospital staff learn from and act on patient experience data.
2014: The Health Foundation. £599,984. Co-applicant. Safety Measuring and Monitoring Programme.
2013: The Health Foundation. £445,000. Lead Investigator (Evaluation). Putting the patient at the heart of patient safety.
2011: Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity. £7,500. Principal Investigator. Developing a transitional pathway for young adults with thalassaemia major, and their families.
Recent Publications
Howarth SD, Johnson J, Millott HE, O’Hara JK. The early experiences of Physician Associate students in the UK: A regional cross-sectional study investigating factors associated with engagement. PLoS One. 2020;15(5):e0232515.
O’Hara JK, Baxter R, Hardicre N. ‘Handing over to the patient’: A FRAM analysis of transitional care combining multiple stakeholder perspectives. Applied ergonomics. 2020 2020/05/01/;85:103060
Albutt A, O’Hara J, Conner M, Lawton R. Can Routinely Collected, Patient-Reported Wellness Predict National Early Warning Scores? A Multilevel Modeling Approach. Journal of patient safety. 2020 Feb 21; 10.1097/PTS.0000000000000672
Ramsey L, Sheard L, Lawton R, O Hara J. How do healthcare staff respond to patient experience feedback online? A typology of responses published on Care Opinion. Patient Experience Journal. 2019;6(2):42-50
O’Hara JK, Canfield C, Aase K. Patient and family perspectives in resilient healthcare studies: A question of morality or logic? Safety Science. 2019 2019/12/01/;120:99-106
Baxter R, O’Hara JK, Murray J, et al. Partners at Care Transitions: exploring healthcare professionals’ perspectives of excellence at care transitions for older people BMJ Open 2018;8:e022468. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-022468
Jane K O’Hara, Katja Grasic, Nils Gutacker, Andrew Street, Robbie Foy, Carl Thompson, John Wright, and Rebecca Lawton. Identifying positive deviants in healthcare quality and safety: a mixed methods study. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, First Published May 11, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076818772230
JK O’Hara, K Aase, J Waring. Scaffolding our systems? Patients and families ‘reaching in’as a source of healthcare resilience. BMJ Qual Saf; 2018 bmjqs-2018-008216
O’Hara JK, Reynolds C, Moore, S et al. What can patients tell us about the quality and safety of hospital care? Findings from a UK multicentre survey study. BMJ Qual Saf, bmjqs-2017-006974.
Armitage G, Moore S, Reynolds C, Laloë PA, Coulson C, McEachan R, Lawton R, Watt I, Wright J, O’Hara JK.
Patient-reported safety incidents as a new source of patient safety data: an exploratory comparative study in an acute hospital in England. Journal of health services research & policy 23 (1), 36-43.
Sheard L, Marsh C, O’Hara J, et al Exploring how ward staff engage with the implementation of a patient safety intervention: a UK-based qualitative process evaluation BMJ Open 2017;7:e014558. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2016-014558.
Louch G, O’Hara J, Gardner P, O’Connor DB. A Daily Diary Approach to the Examination of Chronic Stress, Daily Hassles and Safety Perceptions in Hospital Nursing. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. 2017; Published online first May 22. doi: 10.1007/s12529-017-9655-2.
Louch G, O’Hara J, Mohammed MA. A qualitative formative evaluation of a patient-centred patient safety intervention delivered in collaboration with hospital volunteers. Health Expect. 2017;20:1143–1153. https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.12560
Sheard L, Marsh C, O’Hara JK, Armitage G, Wright J, Lawton R. (2017). The Patient Feedback Response Framework – Understanding why UK hospital staff find it difficult to make improvements based on patient feedback: A qualitative study. Social Science & Medicine, 178, 19-27.
Lawton R, O’Hara JK, Sheard L, Armitage G, Cocks K, Buckley H, Corbacho B, Reynolds R, Marsh C, Moore S, Watt I, Wright J. (2017) Can patient involvement improve patient safety? A cluster randomized control trial of the Patient Reporting and Action for a Safe Environment (PRASE) Intervention. BMJ Quality & Safety. DOI: 1136/bmjqs-2016-005570
Johnson J, Louch G, Dunning A, Johnson O, Grange A, Reynolds C, Hall L, O’Hara JK. Burnout mediates the association between depression and patient safety perceptions: A cross‐sectional study in hospital nurses. Journal of Advanced Nursing. 2017 Jan 1.
Is there a role for patients and their relatives in escalating clinical deterioration in hospital? A systematic review. Albutt AK, O’Hara JK, Conner MT, Fletcher S, Lawton RJ. Health Expectations 20 (5), 818-825.
Buckley H, Cocks K, Lawton R, O’Hara J, Sheard L, Marsh C, et al. Outcomes to measure patient safety: the patient reporting and action for a safe environment (PRASE) trial. Trials. 2015 11/16;16(Suppl 2):P52-P.