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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This paper examines how care home managers in England conceptualised the approach to delivering personalised care in the homes they managed. We conducted interviews with care home managers and mapped the approaches they described on two distinct characterisations of personalised care prominent in the research and practitioner literature: The importance of close care relationships and the degree of resident choice and decision-making promoted by the care home. We derived three 'types' of personalised care in care homes. These conceptualise the care home as an 'institution', a 'family' and a 'hotel'. We have added a fourth type, the 'co-operative', to propose a type that merges proximate care relationships with an emphasis on resident choice and decision-making. We conclude that each approach involves trade-offs and that the 'family' model may be more suitable for people with advanced dementia, given its emphasis on relationships. While the presence of a range of diverse approaches to personalising care in a care home market may be desirable as a matter of choice, access to care homes in England is likely to be constrained by availability and cost.

Original publication

DOI

10.1017/S0144686X20001142

Type

Journal article

Journal

Ageing and Society

Publication Date

01/01/2020