…exploring the concept and defining early core principles

Jennifer Kirsty Burton, PhD, Arne Timon Wolters, MSc, Ann-Marie Towers, MSc, Liz Jones, BA Prof Julienne Meyer, PhD, Prof Adam Lee Gordon, PhD et al. Published:March, 2022

Conclusions

There is a new consensus between UK governments around the need for improved data collection in care homes and a mandate to achieve it by 2024 in England. Co-produced work is required to define and agree the format, content, structure, and operationalisation of such change. Without this, it is likely that stakeholders and their organisations, who are external to the care home, will influence most what data are collected. Implementation decisions on data collection, use, and onwards dissemination will determine the success of an MDS, affecting aspects such as data quality, completeness, and usability. Our pilot work will allow for evaluation of implementation issues and enable informed recommendations for widespread adoption. To realise the potential benefits of an MDS, data collected need to be of consistent quality and the data need to be easy for staff to collect. Care home staff who collect data and residents who provide data need to benefit from the MDS and see value in their contribution. As a team of academics, practitioners, and analysts with established care home interests, we have proposed some early underpinning principles around the development of an MDS for older adult care homes in the UK. We intend to share the experiences and learning from the DACHA study to inform the wider debate and concept development. The knowledge gained from the DACHA study has potential to advance how we capture and share data from all types of long-term care settings by giving parity between biomedical data and data reflecting the priorities and interests of care. This has the potential to influence the narrative on data in long-term care settings and inform a global understanding of what matters to residents, their families, and the staff who support them.

Read in full at…

The Lancet Healthy Longevity Source: Developing a minimum data set for older adult care homes in the UK: exploring the concept and defining early core principles – The Lancet Healthy Longevity