Developing countries already contain large numbers of older people with social care needs, leading to a rapid growth in private provision, including residential services. Many operate on an informal, entirely unregulated basis. We have developed an online platform for sharing information about the quality of services in care homes for the city of La Plata, Argentina. This responded to concerns about poor service quality, an absence of public information and the limited capacity of official local regulators. The site, launched in 2019, consists of a simple interactive information-sharing platform. The site provides updated information about care homes and a set of service quality principles, developed in partnership with care home directors. It enables service users to provide feedback about providers. This feedback is not directly published on the site: instead, complaints are investigated and providers removed from the site if they are confirmed. The site also provides general information for service users to support the selection and assessment of social care services, and (more recently) the status of the COVID-19 pandemic in local care homes. Our project will evaluate the La Plata intervention, along with new related projects by other organisations in Argentina. We will assess the feasibility and potential benefits of scaling up over the next three years.

When are 2021