Understanding lived experience of infection transmission in care homes
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Exploring and Understanding the lived experience in CAre homes for older people of Infection risk and transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed-methods study to inform what we can learn for future infectious disease outbREaks (UCAIRE)
IRAS ID
298772
Contact name
Kathleen Lane
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of East Anglia
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 4 months, 30 days
Research summary
Highly infectious diseases can spread swiftly and cause illness in care homes. Safety measures help stop infections spreading. But these measures have been under strain from COVID-19. It is highly infectious and infected people can spread it before showing symptoms.
Care homes added more measures to deal with COVID-19, including restricting visitors and changing how care is given. But we do not know how residents, families and staff coped with measures to prevent the virus spreading and if these met their needs. We want to learn about their experiences of living and working in places of infection risk.
Care-home staff completed an online survey on challenges they faced trying to prevent infection spreading. We interviewed family and friends of residents and care-home staff to hear their in-depth experiences of coping with COVID-19 and the impact of steps taken to limit infection risk.
We now want to interview residents to hear their experiences of living with infection-control measures, if their needs were met and what they suggest be changed to help residents in future. We will ask if a staff-member would take part supporting residents in the research and facilitating online interviews led by the researcher. We will pay the care home for their time.
We will analyse residents’ interviews and combine the findings with staff, family and friends’ interviews and the survey results. We will write a report on what we learn for our funder, the National Institute of Health Research-School of Social Care Research (NIHR-SSCR). We will publish in journals specialising in long-term care and write a plain language summary for staff, residents and families. We will share findings with social-care organisations and raise awareness of the outcomes.
Our findings will be available to social-care policy-makers to contribute to future policies and guidelines supporting infection-control measures in care homes.REC name
Social Care REC
REC reference
22/IEC08/0012
Date of REC Opinion
12 May 2022
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion