Forging international links, sharing ideas and developing friendships to build research collaborations

Dr Jenni Burton (@JenniKBurton) from the University of Edinburgh and Dr Patrick Wachholz (@Patrick23711608) from Sao Paulo State University joined 12 researchers from across the UK and 17 from across Brazil to participate in a Newton Fund researcher links workshop: ‘Identifying and addressing shared challenges in conducting health and social care research for older people’, held between the 11^th-15^th of June in Botucatu, Brazil. The workshop was funded by the British Council and the Sao Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP) and organised by the University of Nottingham and UNESP.

Over the course of five days we worked together under the supervision of our Brazilian and UK mentors (Prof Alessandro Ferrari Jacinto, Prof Paulo Villas Boas, Prof Vanessa Citero, Dr Adam Gordon, Prof Tom Dening & Dr Jay Banerjee) to share ideas, learn from each other and work on developing new collaborative research projects.

To set the scene, Brazil is the largest country in South America with an estimated population of 16 million adults aged 65 and over. Sao Paulo State has a population of 41 million people and is the most economically and research active state in Brazil with 34% of the GDP. Amazing stat of the week was that for every four research papers published in Latin America, two will be authored in Sao Paulo State!

Predicting who will be admitted to a care home from hospital?

Jenni Burton is a Clinical Research Fellow in Geriatric Medicine funded by the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre and the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. Here she discusses the results of two linked systematic reviews of predictors of care home admission from hospital. She tweets @JenniKBurton.

Care home admission from hospital has long been recognised as an area of significant variation in practice (Oliver D et al. 2014. Making our health and care systems fit for an ageing population) and one which remains a strategic target to reduce across the UK. However, more than half of care home admissions each year in Scotland come directly from hospital settings. It is therefore important to explore the predictors of this life-changing transition to help inform prognostication, communication with individuals and their families, service planning and the extent to which we can intervene to prevent or modify this outcome.