Formal and Informal Support Prior to Admission: Are Self-Funders Being Admitted to Care Homes Unnecessarily?

<p>There has long been a need for information about the circumstances of self-funded residents admitted to care homes for<p><p>older people (Laing and Buisson, 1995). This vulnerable group has no champion beyond their relatives and the overarching<p><p>regulatory framework, and is of fundamental importance when considering the impact of policies designed to bring greater<p><p>equity into the funding of long-term care. The Department of Social Security funded a study conducted during 1999/2000 of<p><p>the financial and informal resources and circumstances of self-funded admissions to care homes. This paper reports on the<p><p>evidence from that study about unmet needs and the level of informal support and formal resources that people were<p><p>drawing on immediately prior to admission.

<p><p><h3>The Study</h3><p><p><p>A sample of homes in England, Scotland and Wales was selected in order to identify recent and future self-funded<p><p>admissions. 481 homes, 96 per cent of those approached, agreed to participate. They were asked to identify all<p><p>self-funded admissions over the previous six months and then contacted on three more occasions to identify all new<p><p>admissions between July 1999 and March 2000. By the end of the study, 292 of the homes had generated 921 self-funded<p><p>admissions over a period of 15 months.

<p><p><p>Basic demographic information was collected about all self-funded admissions. Information about dependency<p><p>characteristics was collected for those admitted within the previous two months at each contact with the home (402<p><p>cases). Relatives were interviewed about the current financial resources available and the circumstances immediately prior<p><p>to admission (331 cases). Wherever possible, information was collected about residents on the same basis as information<p><p>in a previous survey of publicly-funded admissions (Bebbington et al., 1996).