Survey participants wanted to prioritise unmet diagnostics needs in care homes

Opportunity to help prioritise the use of diagnostics in care homes.

In June 2021, we successfully applied for over £50,000 from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaboration for the North East and North Cumbria to examine the benefits and challenges of using diagnostic testing in care homes.

The research is led by Professor Miles Witham, our ageing theme lead. The project involves collaboration with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, NIHR Innovation Observatory, Academic Health Science Network for the North East North Cumbria and our insight panel for patients, public and carers.

We have conducted and analysed interviews with care home staff and healthcare workers working in or alongside care homes. Through this work we have identified more than 30 unmet needs where a new diagnostic might be useful. These include a desire for tests that look at a resident’s blood and changes in patient pathways allowing integrated care between hospitals, general practices and care homes.

We are now hoping to prioritise these, in a two-round survey, and gain some consensus on which unmet needs are the most important. The final, prioritised, list of unmet needs will lay the groundwork for future research to develop novel tests tailored for use in care homes.

The first round of the survey will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. The second round will be circulated in around four weeks, during early October 2023.

You can complete the survey by following this link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/2XQ2JP9

Please feel free to circulate this link to anyone working in the care home sector who you think might be interested. We are particularly keen to collect and analyse the views of care home staff, general practitioners, geriatricians and nurses.