Posted on
15 January 2025
Read time
1 minute
ID:44125879
Care homes – and NHS and social care staff that work with care homes – collect lots of information about the care they provide to their residents on a daily basis. Most of this data does little to influence the care that residents receive because it isn’t collected or collated. One of the challenges to collecting and collating information is that every care home uses slightly different approaches to the data they collect.
This caused very substantial problems during the pandemic when the UK government had very limited data from the care home sector upon which to base decisions. They ended up asking care homes to upload lots of information manually but this process has since been abandoned because it was too labour intensive.
This paper describes the development and piloting of a Minimum Dataset for UK care homes. The dataset was used in 996 residents of 45 care homes in three regions of England. It was feasible and provided very useful insights into the potential impact of such a dataset but also the implementation challenges.
You can read the paper here.
This is one of the final papers from the NIHR funded DACHA study led by Prof Claire Goodman at the University of Hertfordshire. You can read more about DACHA here.
