Admission to a care home from hospital across Scotland
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Admission to a care home from hospitals across Scotland – exploring practice and the role of dementia
IRAS ID
198244
Contact name
Jennifer K Burton
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
Duration of Study in the UK
7 years, 3 months, 31 days
Research summary
Although just under half of new admissions to care homes each year in Scotland come directly from hospital, our understanding in this area is limited. Better understanding what predicts a person’s need to go into a care home from hospital will help us both to identify targets for interventions to delay the need for care home admission and for ensuring care homes are equipped and staffed for residents.
Data about care home residents are collected in multiple ways when they access health and social care services, including prescription data and hospital discharge data. Scotland also has another unique resource in the form of the Care Home Census, which is an annual record about the majority of care home residents. Care home residents are an under-researched, vulnerable population with high levels of need.
This project aims to identify care home residents using routinely collected data, to help understand the accuracy of the data sources. We will use the data to describe patterns of admission from hospital across the regions and then we will look at predictors of admission, with particular interest in the role of dementia.
No new data or assessments are required from the included participants. A key advantage of this proposal is that it uses existing data which were collected during everyday use of health and social care services. This means the research will have the potential to better reflect the everyday experiences of admission to a care home from hospital across Scotland, as it should include all those who have health and social care records.
All personal information (e.g. name, address etc.) which could potentially identify participants will be removed from the dataset before it is made available to the researchers. Data analysis will be conducted via the Edinburgh data ‘Safe Haven’, where it will be securely stored.REC name
South Central - Hampshire B Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/SC/0242
Date of REC Opinion
29 Apr 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion