Here in Scotland we are fortunate to have a valuable resource in the form of the Scottish Care Home Census which is completed annually on behalf of the Care Inspectorate, Scottish Government and Public Health Scotland (PHS) formerly known as Information Services Division (ISD) Scotland.

My aim is to use the care home census data in a data linkage project to describe the patterns and predictors of care home admission from hospital across Scotland.

The care home census data have been linked to the other data sources (hospital admission and discharge records; prescribing data and long-term conditions data) by the team at eDRIS and then transferred into the National Safe Haven for analysis. This process is needed to remove potentially identifiable data before it is seen by researchers.

I was fortunate to receive Scottish Government funding, from the Scottish Informatics and Linkage Collaboration (SILC), to support this work. This reflects the importance of care-home admission as a topic in health and social care planning, particularly in the new climate of integration.

The project has been granted Research Ethics approval via the Integrated Research Application System (IRAS) and Public Benefit & Privacy Panel (PBPP) approval.

An exciting opportunity arose in April 2017 where my project featured in an event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. I was one of three researchers whose work was used as case-examples in a session called 'Scientists have your data', organised by the Usher Institute, ADRC-Scotland and the Farr Institute. It was great to have the opportunity to talk about data linkage research and it's potential for public benefit, particularly for those living in care homes. The Health and Social Care Benchmarking Network are helping spread the word about the project and the following summary outlines what we're planning to do .

A paper arising from the first stage of this work has been published in the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and can be downloaded here.

Funding to continue this work has been generously provided by the Dunhill Medical Trust. The study is continuing as Understanding Pathways into Care Homes Using Data (UnPiCD study) and updates will be available from the dedicated study webpage here.