Improving Wellbeing and Health for Care home residents during COVID [COVID-19]
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Evidence-Based Supported Digital Intervention for Improving Wellbeing and Health of people living in Care Homes and Care Home Staff (WHELD) During COVID-19: An RCT to evaluate COVID Adapted E-WHELD: Benefits and Cost-Effectiveness
IRAS ID
286784
Contact name
Clive Ballard
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Exeter
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 1 months, 12 days
Research summary
More than 400,000 people in the UK live in care homes. These individuals are particularly vulnerable to COVID19; many are frail and the majority have concurrent physical health problems and dementia. This group are at the highest risk of becoming severely ill with COVID and are dependent on a stretched care workforce. The isolation, together with the stresses and distressing nature of the current work environment is also likely to have an impact on the mental health and wellbeing of care staff. It is vital to provide good quality support to enable care staff to remain resilient, and to enable good quality care that maintains the wellbeing of residents with dementia and reduces emerging neuropsychiatric symptoms in residents without increasing harmful sedative medications.
COVID eWHELD is based on the optimized WHELD training intervention on successfully completed in RCTs in 86 care homes, more than 1000 people with dementia. WHELD reduced use of antipsychotics, improved agitation and overall neuropsychiatric symptoms, improved quality of life and reduced mortality for people with dementia (Ballard et al 2016, 2018a). A digital version of WHELD (eWHELD) with virtual supervision in a further care home RCT including 130 people with dementia has demonstrated benefits for staff carers and improvements in the quality of life of people with dementia with eWHELD combined with virtual supervision, but not with e-learning alone (McDermid et al 2018).
The current project will evaluate a COVID adapted version of eWHELD to address current needs of care homes during the COVID pandemic. This will be undertaken in a 2 arm 4 month randomized cluster RCT in 1280 care homes to determine whether COVID adapted eWHELD improves quality of life and mental health for people with dementia in care homes and the mental health of care staff.REC name
West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/WM/0289
Date of REC Opinion
29 Oct 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion