The term 'care home' is not an internationally used term and there is significant variation in how care homes are described across the world. Some of this variation inevitably stems from the wide range of different provision internationally, with different models of health and social care for older people. As a consequence, therefore, it is difficult to summarise research conducted on care-home residents, which can limit our ability to learn from international findings.

With additional support from Dr Terry Quinn (University of Glasgow) and the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group, we aim to develop a search string to help improve the identification of care-home studies in the published literature.

The first step in this work is to identify 'gold standard' terms and journals from which to search. To ensure this is as internationally relevant as possible, a short survey of international experts has been conducted. This will help us identify terms considered relevant by researchers in the field and identify core journals for handsearching. This will also help to establish a wider network of interest and support in the proposed search filter. Formal external collaborators in this work are Professor Yves Rolland and Dr Adam Gordon. The findings of the survey have been published in the Journal of Nursing Home Research.