Care Home Staffing Project

The Care Home Staffing Project has been developed as a partnership initiative between ISD, the Scottish Government Joint Future Unit, the Care Commission and COSLA with involvement from 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 was 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

This report details the outcome of the development phase of the project to identify a way of better informing staffing levels in care homes. The aim of the Project was to determine if a modified Indicator of Relative Need (IoRN) could be used to 'weight' residents' needs according to their level of dependency and relate the weighted residents' needs overall to the hours of care staff in each home.

The developed model has a potential to be used as a benchmarking resource for care staff levels and is likely to be of interest to both management and monitors of existing care homes and as a way of informing possible staff configurations in new homes. On an on-going basis it will allow care homes to keep a check on how their staffing levels might need to vary as residents needs change.

The Stakeholder's report is available here

The Technical report is available 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: