Autumn Speakers Series: Under what circumstances, and in what ways, is a quality improvement collaborative likely to succeed in a care home setting?

Dr Reena Devi is a research fellow in the Division of Medical Sciences and Graduate Entry Medicine at the University of Nottingham. She is working on the PEACH (‘ProactivE heAlthcare for older people living in Care Homes) study, which is led by Dr Adam Gordon, and funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust. She will be speaking at the upcoming BGS Autumn Meeting in London. She tweets @_DrReenaDevi 

Improving healthcare services delivered to older people is high on the national agenda. Nationwide initiatives are currently focusing on this, for example, six of the Vanguard projects set up in response to the 5 year forward view are specifically devoted to delivering new models of healthcare into care homes. Smaller scale initiatives are also being carried out in local settings, such as the PEACH project.

The PEACH project is using improvement science to bridge the gap between what we know and what we do in terms of the healthcare services delivered to care homes in South Nottinghamshire. The project is working with 4 clinical commissioning groups and their associated healthcare and care home providers, and is focusing on bringing healthcare services closer in-line with the Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) model of care.

Hydration and outcome in hospitalised older adults

Dileep Lobo is Professor of Gastrointestinal Surgery at the University of Nottingham and Consultant Hepatopancreaticobiliary Surgeon at Queen’s Medical Centre. In this blog, he discusses his recent Age & Ageing paper on hydration.

Older adults are susceptible to dehydration because of changes that occur with age such as an increase in the threshold at which they become thirsty, which means that they may be in a greater state of dehydration before fluid is consumed.

Identifying health and social care costs for older people

Rachel Elliott and Matthew Franklin are reporting on behalf of the Medical Crises in Older People (MCOP) research team at the University of Nottingham.

As part of a programme developing and evaluating care in older people, our team wanted to know the distribution of health and social care costs of older adults discharged from Acute Medical Units (AMU) in England across six care services (primary care, hospitals, intermediate care, mental healthcare, social care, and the ambulance service). This is the first study to do this in England.