Identification of registered nursing care time for residents of UK Nursing homes using the Minimum Data Set Resident Assessment Instrument (MDS/RAI) and the Resource Utilisation Groups version III (RUG III) resource use casemix system. (Report submitted to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation)

In “The NHS Plan: The Government's response to the Royal Commission on Long Term Care” the Department of Health states:

In the future, the NHS will meet the costs of registered nurse time spent on providing, delegating or supervising care in any setting. Therefore people identified as needing nursing home care will no longer have to meet any of the costs for the registered nurses involved in their care, or for the specialist equipment used by these nurses.

Registered nurses can be involved in resident care in a variety of ways, including assessment and care planning, advising and supervising care and giving direct care to the resident. RGN time will therefore vary according to the complexity of the resident’s needs, the availability of RGN time, and the nature of tasks that are recognised as requiring RGN input. While the requirement for advice and supervision may be constant over time, the nature of tasks and the actual tasks that require RGN (rather than other care staff input) is likely to change according to policy and development of the training of other care staff. It is likely that the latter would be very difficult to specify in a way that would be durable over time and that could be agreed in a readily measurable way.

We undertook a project in four nursing homes in England to determine whether the RUG-III case-mix system could be used as the basis for identifying nursing home residents who receive different levels of registered nursing time.

The project was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.