Improving Health in Care Homes

In the UK, 405,000 older people (aged 65+) currently live in care homes. This represents 16% of older people over the age of 85 (BGS 2020). Within Wessex, there are around 23,500 care home beds (CQC 2020).

Older people living in care homes are likely to have complex and multiple long term conditions requiring ongoing health and social care support. With the onset of Covid-19, care homes have rapidly adopted innovative approaches, transforming not only how they provide care during crisis but also how they liaise with other care providers to keep residents safe. 

Health Innovation Wessex is working across a number of our programmes to help improve the health of care home residents.  Most of our work is a result of commitment over a number of years of responding to the needs of these settings, and some of this work was accelerated as part of the national Covid-19 response.

We engage with our members and care homes to understand the issues and to jointly plan how best to address them. We are presently developing a strategy to ensure that we are responsive to system needs.

We are sensitive to the pressures and priorities faced by care homes, and therefore collaborate across our programmes to ensure that we co-ordinate our activities.

This webpage brings together both national and local resources developed by a number of programmes within Health Innovation Wessex to enable care home managers to find out more about our innovative workstreams, best practice approaches and support, as well the latest developments in national guidance to ensure the health and wellbeing of their residents and staff.