Background

Most care home residents are older adults, living with complex health and care needs.

Emergency hospital admissions may be needed to address acute or urgent health concerns. However, admission to hospital may also be hazardous for older adults, leading to infection, deterioration in cognitive impairment, delirium and loss of functioning.

Preventing non-essential admissions is good for residents, but it also reduces demand/costs for health services. We had recently published a review of effective interventions to reduce hospital attendances and admissions from care homes.

We found high quality evidence from randomised controlled trials (the ‘gold standard’) for:

• advanced care planning;
• goals of care setting; nurse practitioner input;
• palliative care intervention;
• flu vaccination;
• enhancing access to intravenous treatments in care homes.

In this project, we built on that work, looking at what the economic evidence says about effective interventions to reduce hospital admissions and attendances from care homes.

Aims and objectives

Summarise the economic evaluation evidence for effective interventions to reduce hospital attendances and admissions from care homes.

Associated output:

• Which interventions are cost effective at decreasing hospital attendances or hospital admissions from long term care facilities? A systematic review of economic evaluations: Full report (PDF)

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