Listening and Learning Study from Jenni Burton on Vimeo.

Jenni Burton

Academic Geriatric Medicine, University of Glasgow

This research was planned and conducted to address a gap in the Scottish evidence around understanding events in care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. It sought to engage with those with lived experience managing outbreaks to hear their stories and learn from their experiences. Having been involved in earlier quantitative analyses of care home outbreaks in Scotland, I made a commitment to undertake this research. It has been designed to make a positive and constructive contribution, reflecting a study period of significant global change in the face of a novel and unprecedented threat.

The study was inclusive of all staff groups, but care staff are under-represented as a proportion of the workforce. It focused on Scotland as a result of the specific practice context which includes systemic change in the clinical oversight arrangements for care homes (from summer 2020 onwards) and the Crown Office investigation of all care home onset COVID-19 deaths between 2020 to December 2022. Both aspects, combined with Scotland’s diverse adult care home population and varied geographies, created a rich and specific context for the research. In addition, Scotland faces potentially radical change in social care delivery, with the proposed National Care Service and thus opportunities are rich to try to influence service design and policymaking through research.

So, the research makes recommendations, but also asks questions around how to construct more proportionate and contextually appropriate responses to support people living in care homes which range from very practical things (e.g. improving interprofessional communication and information sharing at transitions of care such as hospital discharge) to broader challenges about how to more effectively generate evidence from care home settings.

The full paper is available from BMC Geriatrics: https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-023-04251-z and there is an accessible video summary created by Hazel White: www.vimeo.com/carehome/listeningandlearning

Burton, J.K., Drummond, M., Gallacher, K.I. et al. Listening and learning: a qualitative study of Scottish care home staff experiences of managing COVID-19 between March 2020-August 2022. BMC Geriatr 23, 544 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-023-04251-z