In this blog I am going to explain what a ‘care supporter’ is and what a potential new right to nominate one might mean in practice. I will also share some ways that you can find out more about our research and the resources we will be producing.

I am going to discuss the findings and outcomes of my recent scoping review which aimed to identify the barriers and facilitators to the inclusion of older adults living in UK care homes in research.

Older people are often excluded from health and social care research. This blog discusses recently published recommendations are trying to address this issue.

There is an opportunity for care home residents, relatives and friends, care home staff and other health and social care professionals who work with care homes, and researchers, to get involved at the current stage of this project for which we are actively recruiting.

In this blog, I’d like to take you through some of the exciting benefits I’ve seen in getting Fulford involved in ongoing care home research.

In this blog, we draw on our experiences of developing research to explore coordination of care between care homes and the National Health Service (NHS). The system of healthcare in England can seem daunting and disjointed to many people, but particularly to people living in care homes, families and staff. We wanted to find out about a new role that had been created in the NHS during the pandemic, which was intended to boost standards and coordination of healthcare for people living in care homes. In the early stages of planning the research, we wanted to find out what people who live in care homes thought would be important to know, and to include questions which
researchers or professionals might not ask.

In this blog, Gary introduces the ongoing EHCH Study, which continues to recruit care homes in a two regions of South West England.

People living in care homes should expect the same level of support as if they were living in their own home. This can only be achieved through collaborative working between statutory health and social care providers, the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector, and care home partners. The EHCH model includes seven care elements, which move away from traditional reactive models of care delivery towards proactive care is centred on the needs of individual residents, their families, and care home staff. Such care can only be achieved through a whole-system, collaborative approach.

In this blog I describe a research project that aimed to understand hospital transfers from care homes by focusing on the work and decisions of care home staff.

Pharmacists are now reviewing the medication of older care home residents.  National guidance states that medication reviews should be person-centred, but what does this mean when applied to care home reviews? In this blog I discuss the experience one pharmacist I interviewed shared around a medication review they conducted and what it might mean to undertake a person-centred review.

I previously graduated from Cardiff University with BSc and MSc degrees in Psychology. One of my research interests is in research inclusivity and my PhD project focuses on identifying the
barriers and facilitators to care home resident research participation, and the development of an intervention to support residents in decision-making and advance planning for research, which I will talk about in this blog.