The impact of providing enhanced support for care home residents in Wakefield: Findings from the Improvement Analytics Unit (2019)

Summary

In this briefing, the Improvement Analytics Unit (a partnership between the Health Foundation and NHS England) identifies some early signals of changes in hospital use by vanguard care home residents in Wakefield, in order to inform local learning and improvement.

Content

Key points:

• An evaluation of hospital use among 526 residents aged 65 or over living in 15 vanguard nursing or residential care homes in Wakefield between February 2016 and March 2017, compared with a local matched control group.
• The enhanced support they received had three main strands: voluntary sector engagement, a multidisciplinary team and enhanced primary care support.
• Estimations show that vanguard residents experienced 27% fewer potentially avoidable admissions than the matched control group – the effect was stronger among those who had been resident in a care home for three months or longer.
• But there was no conclusive evidence that overall emergency admissions or A&E attendances differed between the vanguard residents and those in the matched control group.