Assessing care-related quality of life for residents in care homes

The DACHA study, funded from 2019 to 2024, aimed to bring together existing evidence and data sources with care home-generated resident data to deliver the UK’s first care home minimum data set. The study’s focus was older adults living in care homes. After working with Thiscovery to build on their previous research, the team could include evidence-based quality of life outcome measures in the study’s prototype minimum data set for care homes, which has since been rolled out in a prototype.

Participants

More than 80 people: care home residents, old age specialists, care home staff and managers, carers and relatives of care home residents, primary care professionals and commissioners.

Methods

Online surveys, ranking exercises and consensus-building.

Impact

All quality of life measures identified in the project were included in the DACHA study pilot, which has now rolled out to three integrated care sites in England.

Delivered on behalf of:

What we did

Engagement with more than 80 people including, care home residents, old age specialists, care home staff and managers, carers and relatives of care home residents, primary care professionals and commissioners.
Provided access to detailed analysis, allowing the DACHA team to differentiate between different groups’ responses, and use a sophisticated way of managing data.
Offered a new way of holding consensus-building work online which could complement the study’s previous online focus groups, and allow stakeholders from a broad range of experience and expertise to take part.
Provided support on how questions are best phrased online, created mock-ups of tasks and worked with the DACHA team on task design.

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Key insights

This project delivered credible results to inform the DACHA team’s next steps. Based on the rankings and the qualitative feedback in round 2, the team included four of the shortlisted quality of life outcome measures in DACHA’s prototype minimum data set for care homes.

The DACHA team also found they needed to address the key challenge for online consultation - investing effort and imagination into recruiting participants. Participation more than doubled compared to their pre-Thiscovery round of consultation, increasing from 40 to more than 80 responses.

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Improvement in action

The results from these surveys allowed the DACHA team to make rapid evidence-based decisions on what care home measures and domains were seen by stakeholders to be the most important. This had a swift impact in the DACHA study’s pilot, which used all the quality of life measures identified in the work held on Thiscovery.

The pilot has now been rolled out across three integrated care sites in England.

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"Thiscovery worked so well for us. It's a new way of thinking about how we partner in research."

Claire Goodman

Professor of Health Care Research

University of Hertfordshire

Outputs

Journal article

National stakeholder consultation on how to measure care home residents' quality of life

View output ❯

DACHA - Developing research resources And minimum data set for Care Homes’ Adoption and use - is an ARC East of England supported study which was led by the University of Hertfordshire. It was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Service Research and Delivery programme (HS&DR NIHR127234).

Assessing care-related quality of life for residents in care homes

What we did

Key insights

Improvement in action

"Thiscovery worked so well for us. It's a new way of thinking about how we partner in research."

Claire Goodman

Outputs

National stakeholder consultation on how to measure care home residents' quality of life

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