Finding sheltered housing in the data: a research journey

My work focuses on understanding housing transitions in later life, particularly when and why older adults move into different types of housing. We know that housing plays a crucial role in health, independence, and wellbeing, especially as people age. Yet when I began working with linked health and administrative data in Lothian, it quickly became clear that specialised housing for older people is largely invisible in many existing datasets.

The challenge: housing types that don’t show up

In NHS and local authority data, we can often see that someone has moved — for example through a change in GP registration address — but not what kind of place they have moved into. Sheltered housing, extra-care housing, and retirement developments are rarely labelled clearly, making it difficult to study the characteristics and experiences of older adults living in these settings. This is particularly important because residents of these housing types are a potentially vulnerable and under-researched group.

At the start of the project, we assumed this would be a relatively straightforward task. It seemed reasonable to expect that local councils would hold clear and comprehensive records of sheltered housing, extra-care schemes, and similar developments within their areas. In practice, however, this proved much more difficult than expected. After reaching out to several councils across Lothian, we often struggled to identify the right person or team to contact, and in many cases did not receive a response. This highlighted how fragmented and hard to access information on older adult housing schemes can be, even for researchers working closely with public sector data.

As a result, a large part of my early research journey involved trying to answer a practical question:
How can we reliably identify sheltered and extra-care housing in the Lothian region?

Discovering the HousingCare website

During this search, I came across the HousingCare website. The site is designed to help older adults and their families find suitable retirement housing or care homes based on location, housing type, and available services. What stood out immediately was the level of detail and structure in the information provided about individual housing schemes.

For someone trying to make sense of later-life housing from a research perspective, this was a real turning point. The site made visible a landscape of housing that is often hidden in administrative data, and it highlighted just how much work has already gone into systematically cataloguing these schemes.

Connecting with EAC and the Accommodation dataset

HousingCare is part of Elderly Accommodation Counsel (EAC), a charity that has been working for decades to improve housing options and advice for older people across UK. Through further exploration, I learned about the EAC Accommodation dataset, which includes national, regional, and local data showing details of individual housing schemes, developments, and care homes.

After discussions with EAC, we began the process of accessing this dataset for research purposes. The goal is not to study individual housing schemes or residents, but to use the data in a secure and ethical way to help identify broad types of later-life housing within anonymised health datasets. This will allow us to better understand when people move into sheltered or extra-care housing, and what factors are associated with those moves.

Why this matters for research

Access to datasets like the EAC Accommodation dataset has the potential to transform research on ageing and housing. For researchers working with administrative or health data, it provides a way to identify housing types that would otherwise be missed. More broadly, it helps ensure that older adults living in specialised housing are not overlooked simply because their living arrangements are hard to classify.

This journey has reminded me that some of the most important research challenges are not about advanced methods, but about finding the right data — and the right partners. For anyone interested in later-life housing, ageing, or population health, resources like HousingCare and the EAC datasets are invaluable starting points: