General description

In order to improve the timely availability of data related to coronavirus (COVID-19) in adult care homes the Welsh Government and Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) have agreed to publish the number of notifications of deaths of adult care home residents involving COVID-19 (both confirmed and suspected). The location of death may be in the care home, in hospital or another location.

The data is not based on laboratory confirmed tests, and not directly comparable with Public Health Wales (PHW) data. In their rapid surveillance dashboard, PHW include some notifications received from care homes with a positive laboratory confirmed test for COVID-19. These data cannot be added together. Welsh Government publish this data to ensure access to the CIW data is transparent and to provide a timely indication of trends for all deaths to care home residents in Wales, from COVID-19 or otherwise.

Data collection and calculation

Daily return from Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) at a local authority (LA) level. Data is collected on a daily basis via an online form developed and maintained by Care Inspectorate Wales. The data is validated against previous returns and any significant changes are queried. Data is submitted via a CSV file and transferred to a SQL database. Data includes all notifications up to midnight each day.

Frequency of publication

Fortnightly

Data reference periods

1 March 2018 onwards.

Revisions information

Historic data are subject to revision at any point as CIW can re-submit a return anytime, and therefore may differ to that previously published information.

Title

Number of daily notifications of deaths of adult care home residents with and without care provided, by date of notification

Last update

27 June2023 27 June2023

Next update

Archived – No longer updated.

Publishing organisation

Welsh Government

Source 1

Care Inspectorate Wales

Contact email

kas.covid19@gov.wales

Designation

Management information

Lowest level of geographical disaggregation

Wales

Geographical coverage

Wales

Data licensing

You may use and re-use this data free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government License - see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence

Statistical quality

In terms of ‘Confirmed’ COVID-19, from 29 April 2020 onwards, this has been provided to CIW by the care home provider by means of an answer to the question: ‘Was the death a result of confirmed COVID-19?’

Prior to this date, the care home provider wasn’t asked this question, therefore, ‘Confirmed’ for these is where CIW’s inspectors have reviewed the free text data provided by the care home provider (on the questions ‘cause of the person’s death, if known and confirmed by a medical practitioner’ and ‘summary of the circumstances leading up to the persons death and all contributing factors’) and determined that it relates to a confirmed case.

In both scenarios CIW are reliant on the care home provider to inform them appropriately of a confirmed case.

Care homes are required to notify CIW of the location of death and cause of death. Prior to 29 April 2020 this was via a free text box and CIW used manual searches on the data to produce summaries by category. From 29 April 2020 the form was amended to include mandatory tick box categories for COVID-19 Confirmed or Suspected and location (hospital, care home, hospice, ambulance, other). Therefore the methodology used to produce these figures changed from 29 April 2020.

The care home testing policy was expanded on 16 May 2020 to include tests offered to all symptomatic and asymptomatic staff and residents who have never tested positive for COVID-19 even where the home had not reported possible or confirmed cases. More widespread testing may have resulted in some deaths recorded as non-COVID-19 deaths when previously they may have been recorded as suspected COVID-19 deaths.

Due to working patterns, there tends to be a lower number of notifications of confirmed COVID-19 deaths during the weekends when compared to notifications for Monday to Friday. There is often a larger number of notifications on a Monday.

From 26 October 2021, the number of notifications of deaths in adult care home residents were revised to reflect the findings of CIW’s ongoing quality assurance. CIW re-categorised the cause of deaths for some residents which resulted in a decrease of 15 suspected COVID-19 notified deaths and an increase of 15 non-COVID-19 deaths between March and April 2020. Revised figures are denoted with an ‘(r)’ on StatsWales.

To ensure accurate reporting of provisional counts of deaths in care homes, based on notifications by care home providers, CIW carried out a detailed review of the data. They found that on a few occasions, some providers had reported duplicate notifications of the same death, either through provider error or in an attempt to provide updates to previous notifications. From 12 October 2021, these duplicates were removed from the published figures. This process resulted in a decrease in the number of deaths of residents in adult care homes, and adult and child care homes (a decrease of 92 non-COVID-19 related deaths and 13 COVID-19 related deaths for the period between 1 January 2019 and 1 October 2021).

To ensure accurate reporting of provisional counts of deaths in care homes, based on notifications by care home providers, CIW carried out a detailed review of the data. They found that on a few occasions, some providers had reported duplicate notifications of the same death, either through provider error or in an attempt to provide updates to previous notifications. From 27 July 2022, these duplicates were removed from the published figures. This process resulted in a decrease in the number of deaths of residents in adult care homes, and adult and child care homes.
Duplicates may still occur as it is possible that providers could continue to report multiple notifications of the same death, however, CIW conduct regular quality assurance to minimise the impact this could have on the data. If revisions are submitted, revised figures will be published on StatsWales, denoted with an ‘(r)’, indicating that the figure has been revised since the last publication.

Weblinks

https://gov.wales/notifications-care-inspectorate-wales-related-covid-19-adult-care-homes
https://careinspectorate.wales/data-death-notifications-involving-covid-19

Keywords

COVID-19, Coronavirus, CIW, Care homes, Deaths

Name

hlth0099