Care Home Staffing Project

The Care Home Staffing Project has been developed as a partnership initiative between the Scottish Executive Joint Future Unit, the Care Commission and COSLA with involvement from the key stakeholders. The terms of reference for the project were agreed by the Joint Future Implementation and Advisory Group, which led to the setting up of the Development Group and Reference Group. The Remit is to design a study to investigate if and how the Single Shared Assessment - Indicator of Relative Need (SSA-IoRN) might be used in future to inform staffing levels within care homes for older people in Scotland.

View the project leaflet here

Data on care home residents including levels of relative need, characteristics of the care homes and staffing levels within care homes have been collected during the pre-pilot and pilot phases of the study.

The pre-pilot phase covered four care homes and its purpose was to test the approach to the study. The aim of the pilot phase was to test a refined data collection process, informed by the pre-pilot phase, and to collect data on a sample of five care homes in order to provide sufficient evidence on which to base a decision as to whether or not it would be feasible to achieve the aims of the study.

The results and findings of the pre-pilot and pilot phase are included in the Care Homes Staffing Project report. The report contains further details on: the pre-pilot and pilot phases; the Data Envelopment Analysis model, used to inform staffing levels; the Task Groups established to facilitate progress of the study and the Conclusions and Recommendations for progress to a full study.

An overview of the project is available here

The main study is now underway involving over 100 care homes. The analysis of the results, which will be based IoRN, is due to be reported on during August 2007.

For details of the main project see here

For the revised questionnaire suitable for use in care homes for older people see here

For further information on the stakeholders in this project please click on the following links: