Care for older people living in care homes could be improved by focussing on improving their wellbeing and supporting residents to work towards the things they want to achieve.
The impact of care on the wellbeing and quality of life of care home residents shouldn’t be underestimated. It can be assessed using specially developed ‘outcome measures’, tools to assess how a care home resident is doing.
We believe these outcome measures can be used for more than assessing a resident’s condition. We think that care homes could use outcome measures to improve how they plan care for their residents. Using outcome measures to plan care means that providers focus on what their residents want and what their goals are.
Planning care in this way means that it is outcomes-based. This type of care places people (residents and carers) and their wellbeing at the centre of the planning and delivery of social care support.
Our project will explore how two outcome measures — the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) and the ICECAP capability measures — can be used to plan outcome-based care.
These two outcome measures can be used to evaluate how social care is delivered. They can also be used to monitor and assess how care is progressing and to adjust how it is delivered.
We will:
The measures we develop will focus on positive outcomes for care home residents. This means that the overall quality of care should improve. It also means that the quality of life of the people being cared for should also improve. We hope that providers, commissioners and regulators will be able to use the results of our research to make these changes.