Measuring the Outcomes of Care Homes.

Ann Netten, et al

Personal Social Services Research Unit, 2010

This is the final report on a project which developed and tested an approach to measuring and monitoring outcomes of the care and support provided to residents of care homes for older people and people with learning disabilities. Care homes represent the most intensive type of support provided to some of the most disabled members of the population. The research was part of the ‘Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users’ (MOPSU) project, which was funded over three years (2007-2009) by the Treasury under the Invest to Save budget and led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The MOPSU project consists of three main work-strands all working towards the overall aims of:

1. more efficient and effective commissioning and procurement of services, placing the issues of quality and value for money at the heart of the decision-making process
2. encouraging the use of ‘outcomes’ measures to assess the impact of services on their users, across the spectrum of providers
3. examining the extent to which the third sector is involved in public service delivery and helping to alleviate barriers to entry to third sector organisations

Work undertaken at PSSRU focused primarily on developing approaches to measuring and monitoring the value of social care. The overarching aim was to develop the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) that would provide a variety of approaches to identifying and monitoring value across the range of social care interventions.

The report starts by outlining the overall approach to identifying the value of public services and identify the overarching aims of the study. It then discusses how outcomes are defined, identified and measured and the type of information that is already available, through the regulator, which might be drawn on when monitoring the value of care homes.

Two other reports from this project are also available: the first on measuring the outcomes of information and advice services, and the second on measuring the outcomes of low-level services.

For our editor’s blog on care outcomes, click here.

N.B. This document can be downloaded by clicking on the ‘Download’ button to the right of this summary.