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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Variation in ambulance call rates for care homes in Torbay, UK | | Author(s) | Jason Hancock |
| Journal title | Health and Social Care in the Community, vol 25, no 3, May 2017 |
| Publisher | Wiley, May 2017 |
| Pages | pp 932-937 |
| Source | wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hsc |
| Keywords | Care homes ; Nursing homes ; Ambulance services ; Admission [hospitals] ; Accident & emergency depts ; Evaluation ; Torbay. |
| Annotation | Emergency ambulance calls represent one of the routes of emergency hospital admissions from care homes. The present study aimed to describe the pattern of ambulance call rates from care homes and to identify factors predicting those homes calling for an ambulance most frequently. To this end data were obtained from South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust on 3,138 ambulance calls relating to people aged 65 and over from care homes in the Torbay region between April 2012 and July 2013. This was supplemented with data from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) website on home characteristics and outcomes of CQC inspections. Descriptive statistics were used to identify variation in ambulance call rates for residential and nursing homes and negative binomial regression models were fitted in order to determine if call rates were predicted by home type (nursing versus residential), the five standards in the CQC reports, dementia care status or travel time to hospital. 146 residential and nursing homes were included in the analysis. The number of calls made ranged from 1 to 99. The median number of calls per resident per year was 0.51. Nursing homes had a lower call rate than residential homes; care homes failing the quality and suitability of management standard had a lower call rate compared to those who passed; and homes specialising in dementia had a higher call rate compared to those not specialising. These findings require replication in other regions to establish their generalisability and further investigation is required to determine the extent to which call rate variability reflects the different needs of resident populations or differences in care home policies and practice. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-170609221 A |
| Classmark | KW: LHB: O8: LD:QKH: LD6: 4C: 8DEH |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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