Understanding hospital transfers from care homes in England (v1.0)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
From the care home to the hospital: Developing an understanding of resident transfers from care homes in England
IRAS ID
244710
Contact name
Fawn Harrad
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leicester
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 30 days
Research summary
Care home residents are often transferred to hospital, for example, when acute healthcare services are not available in the home. Although transfers can be crucial to ensuring the resident receives the most appropriate clinical care, studies conducted outside of England have suggested that many transfers are attributable to non-clinical factors (i.e. not primarily driven by the expectation that a transfer will result in a better quality of life or clinical outcomes for the resident). Reducing the number of transfers from care homes may have economic benefits for the National Health Service (NHS) and could also be beneficial for care home residents. This is because a transfer to a busy hospital can be both physically and psychologically stressful and associated with further ill-health and cognitive decline.
Research focussing on reducing transfers has been criticised for ignoring the events that precede a transfer. There is a limited body of research that seeks to understand the complex decision-making process that care home staff undertake before initiating the transfer. The majority of the aforementioned research has been conducted outside of England, which raises questions about the applicability of existing knowledge to the health and social care landscape in England. In addition, most existing research has focussed solely on care homes that provide nursing services on site, overlooking residential care homes that do not.
The aim of the current project is to develop an in-depth understanding of the factors that lead to care home residents in England to be transferred out of the care home to a hospital. By conducting ethnographic fieldwork in up to four care homes, the project team will develop a model of escalation to describe the decisions and processes that occur in the care home prior to the transfer of a care home resident.
REC name
Social Care REC
REC reference
18/IEC08/0033
Date of REC Opinion
12 Nov 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion