How do care home staff use data to improve care in care homes for older people?

Introduction

Standardising data collection and collation in care homes is a policy priority. The DACHA study piloted and tested a care home Minimum Dataset   This follow-up study aimed to understand how care homes deploy data to improve care.

Methods

Interviews with care home staff, residents, relatives and other stakeholders (n= 22) from three care homes, explored data usage. Interview data were synthesised and thematically analysed with findings used to inform worked examples of how data informs care. These exemplars were presented at workshop with commissioners, healthcare providers and Electronic Care Record (ECR) vendors to test their relevance and resonance for services working in and with care homes.

Results

Exemplars developed from the findings focused on systematically using data for predicting unwellness/agitation, the importance of valuing soft data to support individualised care, and supporting relatives’ involvement in and understanding of the care being provided.

Discussing the data they needed for care and developing exemplars led staff to refine and change ECR data fields and include quality of life outcome measures. The process also supported an exploration of day-to-day decisions staff made about what is important to document, how systematic this was, and if what mattered to the residents was always captured. The findings highlighted the importance of peer support and training to build staff confidence in using data and ensure data collected were meaningful and the basis for decision making.

Conclusion

Staff and relatives already use data in multiple ways to understand and support care delivery.  Discussion about how data collection could inform care decisions led staff to develop skills in data literacy to appraise care delivered and value the process of data capture as an aid to practice.