VIVALDI 2 Findings
Researchers on the VIVALDI Study have been investigating the impact of COVID-19 on care homes and what can be done to prevent infection from spreading among staff and residents. The study was set up in June 2020 and information from over 50,000 care home staff and residents across more than 300 care homes in England has been collected.
The researchers have been exploring 2 key questions:
- Can care home staff and residents be infected with covid-19 more than once?
- Does one dose of vaccine stop covid-19 infection in care home residents?
The findings from the study suggest that people living and working in care homes who have been infected with COVID-19 before are unlikely to get infected a second time. They also demonstrate that a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine gives care home residents a good level of protection against COVID-19 infection after one month.
Overall, the results from this study suggest that vaccination reduces a) the total number of people who get infected and b) vaccination makes it less likely that infected people will transmit infection. These results support evidence that vaccinations work well in preventing COVID-19 infection in care homes.
Further information about the two research questions can be found by clicking on the following links:
VIVALDI Study: Can care home staff and residents be infected with covid-19 more than once?
VIVALDI Study: Does one dose of vaccine stop covid-19 infection in care home residents?
VIVALDI Study – Ongoing Research
The researchers on the VIVALDI study are now working with staff and residents across 300 care homes to investigate:
• How much protection vaccination provides against infection and for how long?
• How much protection vaccination with two doses provides against infection and for how long?
This will help them to work out how often people need to be re-vaccinated, and when it might be safe to relax social distancing measures in care homes.
VIVALDI part one
As the researchers responsible for the Vivaldi 1 study, we are very keen to ensure our finding are widely disseminated in a way that the care sector can easily access and share. We are hugely grateful to the sector for their support with this study and especially to the care home managers who took part in the survey for the Vivaldi 1 study. We want to ensure that you and all your colleagues were able to have a handy short summary of the key findings from the study.
Download the Vivaldi summary for care home managers
The NCF is pleased to support the sharing of this summary for care home managers. You may well have heard reference to the Vivaldi study, so it is really helpful to have a short summary for the workforce in the sector.
This research focusses on the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and is valuable insofar as it goes. The research largely reiterates the conditions that we have long understood to be essential to the delivery of great care – a stable staff team, who are subject to good employment conditions, work in teams or clusters within a home to ensure strong relationships with the people they care for, have a good staff to resident ratios and are not overly reliant on agency staff.
It is testament to the not for profit sector that they have been better able to sustain this favoured level of strong employment practice in the face of the pandemic, and so it is positive to see this approach reinforced by the Vivaldi study and its findings that care homes that were classified as ‘not for profit’ care were better able to minimise outbreaks within care homes.
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