Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

What is CONDOR-CH

Care homes are very important providers of care for people with additional and complex health and care needs. There are three times more care home beds than there are acute hospital beds, proving just how important it is to make sure we are providing effective and safe care for care home residents.

The challenge to both prevention and management of care home outbreaks of COVID-19, is dependency on laboratory tests for the presence of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) that must be sent away to laboratories, and often take days to return.  From a preventative perspective, this makes it difficult to know if new admissions, or residents returning from hospital, who may be asymptomatic, are carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This means care homes do not know who to isolate to protect other residents until it is too late.

Clinical evaluations of tests to date have mainly been single-centre, employing differing reference standards with variable protocols. No evaluations have been conducted in the care home setting. There remains an urgent need for a multi-site, rapid, and methodologically robust approach to in-context clinical validation.

Access to real time results from diagnostic tests could be transformative in enabling care homes to identify outbreaks early and respond accordingly, for example by closing to admissions, or by reconfiguring home layout and staffing rotas to account for the need to cohort residents with COVID-19.

The people who best understand care homes are those who work and live there. CONDOR-CH will work with the care home sector, to understand how staff and residents respond to, and manage new technologies.  This way, we can ensure that we validate technologies for real-world care in care homes.