Care Home Patients – outstanding QOF indicators

In order to assist practices in identifying outstanding QOF activity required for Care Home patients, Ardens has created a folder of searches.  

Please note that these searches can help you understand the work that might be needed. However, they should not be regarded as a complete picture of outstanding QOF activity and should be used as a guide only.

The searches are located in Population Reporting > 5.22 Contracts – QOF – Misc, and then in the Action – QOF Care Home only 24-25 folder.

This folder contains searches similar to the QOF Monitor searches in folder 5.20, but which have been restricted only to patients that are on the Care Home register, i.e. are coded as living in a care home.

Open up the folder, to see that there are sub-folders for each of the QOF clinical domains, the public health domains, and also for vaccinations and immunisations.

It is important to note that searches are only relevant for the current QOF year, as noted in the main folder title.

All the searches are based on a parent search called ‘Lives in a Care Home (Parent search)’.  There is a reminder about this in the first sub-folder title, and you can see this also in the definition tab of the register searches:

This ensures that all the sub-searches will only return patients coded as on the Care Home register.

You can also see this ‘parentage’ by selecting Full Hierarchy on the ribbon, to show the relationship (or hierarchy) between the searches.

Each folder contains contains individual searches and also other folders.  You should not need to access any of the searches in the Denominator Populations or Sub Searches folders.

As an example, the searches in the Diabetes folder report on achievement for specific activities, such as patients who have had foot screening in the last 12 months, or patients who are on a statin medication with history of CVD.

Run the searches either by running the whole ‘Action’ folder, or by running an individual sub-folder, such as the Diabetes folder.  

Because these searches show you the patients who have had what is needed for QOF, you will need to use the Population Excluded tab to see the lists of patients that are outstanding work for QOF.

Remember that the Parent Population of all of the searches in the Action – QOF Care Home Only 24-25 folder is the Care Home register, so all other (non-care home) patients have been filtered out at the start.

Should you need to investigate a patient on the Population Excluded list further, you can use the Check Patient feature to find out where the patient does or does not meet the search’s rules.

Housebound patients

You may wish to run the same searches, but for your housebound patients instead. This can be achieved with a small amount of editing of the ‘Register’ search.   

For example, looking at the Asthma folder, select the AST005: Register search, and then right click on the search and select Properties.  You can also select this from the ribbon.

The Properties box will display.

Then you will need to change the parent population at the bottom of the screen.  Click on the spyglass and on the next screen select the Housebound subreport instead.

Click OK and the ‘Results from’  selection will display as follows:

Then click OK to close the screen and save the changes.   All reports below and including the Asthma register will now only capture patients who are coded as housebound instead of care home.

If you require any further assistance on the process above, please contact Ardens support on: support-emis@ardens.org.uk