Evaluating residential care in Camden: A review of our pilot project with Healthwatch Camden

A joint report published by Independent Age having worked with Healthwatch Camden. The report publication was March, 2017.

This project was designed to pilot a new set of indicators and a method for using these to assess care homes. Once completed, we wanted to carefully evaluate:

• how easy it was to elicit the information we wanted using the Enter and View visits process

• how appropriate the indicators were for people thinking about care homes choices

• whether the final product – the set of reports – really would aid decision making for local people.

In order to answer these questions, we evaluated the project through:

• a questionnaire to all the volunteer visitors, to hear about their experience of doing the visits and asking questions of management, staff, residents and families.

• two focus groups held in January 2017 with 16 Camden residents who had expressed an interest in local care homes, to hear about their experience of reading the reports Healthwatch Camden had produced. These were 90 minute sessions and participants were asked to read two of the reports in advance. The audio recordings from the groups were transcribed. Quotes from participants feature throughout this evaluation report.