Context: The strategic commissioning of care homes for older people involves ensuring: needs identification; plans for those needing care and support; understanding and support of care home providers; and service delivery monitoring. In England this is undertaken by local government with care delivered by independent providers. Objective: To identify and appraise the routine data available in England during 2020-21 to inform the strategic commissioning of care homes, and to explore, through engagement with commissioners, the types of data required to support future decision-making. Methods: A scoping study was undertaken. Sources of publicly available and routinely collected data that could assist strategic commissioners were appraised using a conceptual framework of four domains and 19 indicators. These were contextualised through a rapid literature review relating to care home commissioning undertaken between March 2020 and December 2021. Data were extracted from 16 publications. Findings were synthesised and co-produced through a sense-making exercise with 10 representatives that had experience and knowledge of commissioning processes. Findings: Routinely recorded numerical data from national collections are only of limited utility to strategic commissioners of care homes. Data are required from multiple sources – both national and local, and real-time and historical. The importance of working in partnership with stakeholders to improve commissioning and to develop an appropriate service mix within localities was highlighted, and a range of areas for development were identified. The work highlights where new and emerging types of data can be employed to address those areas of information that were unavailable to social care commissioners, providing both a baseline and a framework for the evaluation of new data infrastructure.
Chester et al. (Thu,) studied this question.