This website was started in March 2020 to provide a platform to share learning on:
- the impact that COVID-19 was having on people who use and provide long-term care (in the community and in group settings and institutions, including unpaid and paid care);
- the factors that mediated these impacts, including, for example, the underlying situation of long-term care systems, characteristics of care homes, employment condition of staff, social protection for carers, etc;
- the policy and practice measures that different countries are adopting to prevent and mitigate these impacts;
- emerging evidence on the experience of implementing those measures;
- emerging evidence of the effectiveness of measures to prevent and mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 on people who use and provide long-term care;
- resources to support service users and providers during the pandemic
As well as sharing reports, articles and resources, the LTCcovid platform supports a series of webinars which, in many occasions, has led to international collaborations from researchers who were addressing similar questions in different countries.
The website has a section on country reports (that will soon to updated to provide more easier to update country profiles), international reports that bring together learning from different countries, a section with summaries of emerging evidence, a searchable database of research projects on COVID-19 and long-term care, and a searchable collection of policy and practice resources.
This platform started as a spontaneous activity that grew thanks to the many people who contributed reports voluntarily. It started with members of the International Long-Term Care Policy Network, but it quickly expanded to include many others, thanks in part to social media. The SIIS (Centre of Documentation and Studies) have led the resources compilation, building on their existing work in Spain. The Care Policy and Evaluation Centre has supported the website development and funded research assistance.
Since January 2021, the website is supported through a research project: Social Care COVID Recovery & Resilience: Learning lessons from international responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in long-term care systems, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Policy Research Programme (PRP) – Recovery, Renewal, Reset: Research to inform policy responses to COVID-19 in the health and social care systems. Grant number: NIHR202333.
The (growing) team working on this so far: Adelina Comas-Herrera, Jose-Luis Fernandez-Plotka, Annette Bauer, Michael Horn, Kaylee Knowles, Klara Lorenz-Dant, Jae Yeon Lyu, Anji Mehta and Ben Schlaepfer.