Evaluating - and making sense of - the changes that occur following the implementation of the Tidal Model within a service, are very important, but can be difficult to study. One of the obvious features of all such studies is that the results will vary from one setting and team to the next.
People often ask us: "Does the Tidal Model work? We do not believe that the Model can be shown to work any more than the sheet music for a Mozart Concerto can be said to 'work'. To make great music we need great musicians. Consequently, we believe that any realistic study of the Tidal Model in practice must focus on the 'workings' of the team - both individually and collectively. It must also take account of the organisational context, the support available to the team, the quality of the environment and a range of other physical, social and interpersonal factors. Clearly, any such study will be as complex as it is interesting. Through such a multidimensional study we might be able to say that this team, working in this way, doing these kinds of things, with this kind of support, achieved these sorts of results.
Such studies may well be more focused on 'evaluating' what happens within a specific service setting, rather than 'researching' a concept at a more global level. If we are really interested in promoting change, we believe that we must focus on 'how change happens' in specific settings, rather than talk about 'change' as a general concept.
Below, we have listed four key studies that report on 'what happened' when Tidal was introduced into a service.
