Developing a Quality of Life Tool with Care Homes

What we are doing

We aim to understand quality of life (QoL) of care home residents from the perspectives of residents, their relatives and staff carers. This will help guide the development of a care home specific quality of life tool based on residents priorities. We will then test the quality of the tool and its feasibility for use routinely in care homes.

Why we are doing it 

When care home residents, their relatives and staff are interviewed, they say maximising quality of life is important. However, we are unable to measure changes in QoL in care home practice because of some of the limitations of current measures. This include either not designed for care homes hence do not incorporate residents priorities, or focus on either health or social aspects of QoL rather than broader QoL and are designed for research purposes so maybe labor intensive and time consuming for routine use. 

What the benefits will be and to whom?

For the residents, the tool will help identify their unmet needs. For relatives, it will keep them informed and involved in their relatives’ care and if this information is aggregated and made publicly available it can help them in choosing care homes for their relatives. For care homes, routinely collected quality of life data can help monitor the quality of care provided, help inform care decisions and evaluate the effects of interventions implemented. At policy level, the tool can help inform commissioning decisions and also can be used by inspectors to evaluate care homes quality of care.

Who we are working with

We will be working with care home residents, their relatives and staff carers across care homes in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Care home experts including health and social care professionals, researchers, academics and quality regulators. We will also be working with patient and members of the public throughout the study.

Contact

Adeela Usman. Doctoral Training Fellow, The University of Nottingham, Adeela.usman@nottingham.ac.uk

Photo by Matthias Zomer from Pexels