Session chair:
- Ellen Coughlan, Programme Manager, The Health Foundation
Presenters:
- Professor Jo Knight, Professor of Applied Data Science, Lancaster Medical School/Lancaster University
- Dr Laura Shallcross, Associate Professor at the Institute of Health Informatics, University College London
- Dr Fiona Grimm, Principal Data Analyst, The Health Foundation
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the stark differences between health and social care with respect to the availability of timely and granular data on the demand for and the quality of care. Despite improvements in data collection during the pandemic, efforts to respond to the outbreak and to understand the impact on residents’ needs and outcomes were hampered by longstanding weaknesses the social care data system.
This session will showcase innovative research from across the UK aiming to improve our understanding of how COVID-19 has affected care homes and their residents and what is needed to better protect and support them going forward. To tackle these challenges, these studies made use of a combination of routinely collected data, novel data sources and advances in linkage methodologies. Presentations from three speakers will cover the following topics:
- Informing the public health response to COVID-19 in English care homes,
- Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health service provision and outcomes for care home residents,
- Supporting evaluation of the vaccine rollout in care homes,
- Informing effective, safe management of care home residents in the future.
The session is intended to highlight opportunities, challenges and common pitfalls in using linked datasets and routine data at the intersection of health and social care. Presentations will be followed by a panel Q&A session.