Background The ‘Productive Ward: Releasing Time to Care’ programme is a quality improvement (QI) intervention introduced in English acute hospitals a decade ago to: (1) Increase time nurses spend in direct patient care. (2) Improve safety and reliability of care. (3) Improve experience for staff and patients. (4) Make changes to physical environments to improve efficiency.

Objective To explore how timing of adoption, local implementation strategies and processes of assimilation into day-to-day practice relate to one another and shape any sustained impact and wider legacies of a large-scale QI intervention.

Design Multiple methods within six hospitals including 88 interviews (with Productive Ward leads, ward staff, Patient and Public Involvement representatives and senior managers), 10 ward manager questionnaires and structured observations on 12 randomly selected wards.

Results Resource constraints and a managerial desire for standardisation meant that, over time, there was a shift away from the original vision of empowering ward staff to take ownership of Productive Ward towards a range of implementation ‘short cuts’. Nonetheless, material legacies (eg, displaying metrics data; storage systems) have remained in place for up to a decade after initial implementation as have some specific practices (eg, protected mealtimes). Variations in timing of adoption, local implementation strategies and contextual changes influenced assimilation into routine practice and subsequent legacies. Productive Ward has informed wider organisational QI strategies that remain in place today and developed lasting QI capabilities among those meaningfully involved in its implementation.

Conclusions As an ongoing QI approach Productive Ward has not been sustained but has informed contemporary organisational QI practices and strategies. Judgements about the long-term sustainability of QI interventions should consider the evolutionary and adaptive nature of change processes.