This work is a small part of a wider NIHR-funded study in the Universities of Stirling and Dundee, using the 'Older People's Routine Acute Assessment' (OPRAA) cohort data. The OPRAA cohort was established by Professor E Reynish and Dr V Cvoro and represents data from older adults admitted to hospital in Fife who had been assessed using the tool. This gathered information about their cognitive, functional and home circumstances at the time of admission to hospital and the data have been anonymised and linked to their health records to allow follow-up. You can read the final report from the study here.

Within the group we worked on methods to identify care home residents in routinely collected data. This is necessary to inform the project's primary outcome measure and to identify the cohort who are newly admitted to a care home after discharge. We have compared various different methods to identify care home addresses and looked at existing flags or markers within the data which have been created for this purpose.

Our paper arising from this work has been published in Age and Ageing and can be downloaded here.

A second paper using the data to undertake the primary outcome analysis and understand the role of cognitive spectrum disorders in discharge destination was published in BMC Medicine and can be downloaded here.