Our Research Fellow, Elizabeth Lemmon, has been contributing to several reports on the impact of COVID-19 within the long term care (LTC) system in Scotland and around the world, with colleagues from the University of Stirling, Edinburgh Napier University, London School of Economics and the Bruyère Research Institute. These reports are being produced for the Long Term Care Policy Research Network’s newly established LTC responses to COVID-19 platform, which aims to:
- Document the impact of COVID-19 on people who rely on long-term care (including unpaid care) and those who provide it.
- Share information about policy and practice measures to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 in long-term care and gather evidence about their success or otherwise.
- Analyse the long-term implications of this pandemic for long-term care policy.
The Scotland report – available here – focuses mainly on the impact of COVID-19 within Scottish Care Homes, where the impact has been particularly devastating. At the most recent release of this report (3rd June), around 47% of all COVID-19 deaths occurred in care homes. Furthermore, as shown in the figure below, more than 62% of all Scottish care homes had reported at least one outbreak of COVID-19.
The International report – available here – also focuses on care homes and care home residents, but aims to draw comparisons between countries around the world. This is incredibly difficult due to the different geographical, demographic and political contexts, which is further complicated by significant differences in the recording of data. The report highlights the key difficulties associated with mortality recording and the need to use data on all care home residents and not only those occurring within the care home.
Both reports are live documents that are being updated as new data become available. Elizabeth is also involved in a new report which is currently underway on the UK situation. This report hopes to draw useful comparisons between the four UK nations.
