Evaluating Community Care for Elderly People: Outcomes for Users and Carers

First paragraph: Following the community care reforms of the early 1990s, the PSSRU was commissioned by the Department of Health to conduct a substantial evaluation of these changes relating to services for older people and their carers. The resulting study, Evaluating Community Care for Elderly People (ECCEP), has been underway at the Kent and LSE branches of the Unit since 1994. ECCEP was designed as the second stage of a before and after study, with results from the first stage (the Domiciliary Care Project, or DCP) being published in Resources, Needs and Outcomes in Community-Based Care (Davies, Bebbington, Charnley and colleagues, 1990). Both DCP and ECCEP conducted interviews with users, carers and care managers in the same ten local authorities in England and Wales, with the DCP sample recruited during the mid 1980s and the ECCEP sample recruited in late 1995 and early 1996. In both stages of the study, users, carers and care managers were interviewed twice: once (Time I) following the user's referral to social services and once six to nine months later (Time II).