Measuring outcomes and improving quality in English care homes

There is increased policy emphasis on outcomes, but how do we identify these and then use this information to improve outcomes for individuals? In England the Adult Social Care Outcome Toolkit (ASCOT) measure has been developed with the objective of being able to compare social care outcomes across a wide range of services. It measures social care related quality of life (SCRQoL) across eight domains and innovative approaches have been developed to establish the impact of service interventions in the absence of costly and demanding research designs. The toolkit includes a multi-method approach to establishing outcomes in care homes, which has attracted widespread interest. Follow-up work has developed a model for, and identified relationships between, workforce characteristics and qualifications and outcomes for residents. Further work is currently building on this to develop an approach to improving quality of care by providing a range of tools to understand resident experiences, where problems in delivering outcomes might lie, and how these might be addressed. The presentation will describe the basis for the ASCOT measure, the methods used and results from a study of 300 residents of residential care homes for older people. We will describe the model of expected relationships between workforce and institutional characteristics and outcomes and current progress in developing the approach to improving quality.