Despite increased research interest in care homes and their residents, this sector is still not well understood.  Randomised controlled trials offer high quality data on resident demographics, clinical outcomes, resource use, and care home characteristics, measured at specific timepoints.  Care home trials may look at different types of interventions and multiple clinical areas, but the inclusion criteria and basic information collected is often very similar.  The Virtual International Care Homes Trials Archive collates and pools individual participant data (IPD) from trials conducted in care homes, to allow future researchers to conduct secondary analyses on this rich data source.

VICHTA may be of interest to many different research fields, including medicine for elderly, rehabilitation, mental health teams, health service researchers and clinical trial methodologists, all of whom will have their own research ideas to test based on respective specialisms.