Study title

The Older Persons and Informal Caregivers Survey - Minimum DataSet (TOPICS-MDS) is a public data repository which contains information on the physical and mental health and well-being of older persons and informal caregivers and their care use across the Netherlands. The database was developed at the start of The National Care for the Elderly Programme (‘Nationaal Programma Ouderenzorg’ - NPO) on behalf of the Organisation of Health Research and Development (ZonMw - The Netherlands), in part to ensure uniform collection of outcome measures, thus promoting comparability between studies.
Between 2008 en 2016, 53 different research projects have contributed data to this initiative, resulting in a pooled dataset with cross-sectional and (partly) longitudinal data of >43,000 older persons and >9,000 informal caregivers. Out of these numbers, a number of 7,600 concerns care receiver - caregiver dyads of whom information on both the care receiver and caregiver is available.
The 'TOPICS-MDS NPO caregiver’ dataset contains no care receiver (older person) data, only informal caregiver data.