The HOPES 2 study commences this month. Led from the University of York by Dr Louise Newbould and Dr Mark Wilberforce, the project’s full title is ‘Helping older people with mental health needs to engage with social care: Enhancing support worker skills through a prototype learning and development intervention’. Dr Kritika Samsi, Research Fellow at this Unit, is also working on the study, which is funded by the NIHR School for Social Care Research. (542 words)

This project is about the care of older people living with dementia and complex mental health needs. Many studies show that outside help can be hard to accept for people living with poor mental health or memory difficulties. Understanding the purpose of care and communicating any worries can be hard. Sometimes people will reject the care verbally or physically, which can result in them being labelled as a ‘difficult person’. Providing care in these situations can be hard, when home care workers are under pressure to deliver care in often short timeframes. As a result, relationships between the individuals and service providers can sometimes fall apart. Our previous research suggests that “specialist support workers” within community mental health services may help older people living with dementia or with complex mental health needs to accept social care. However, these specialist support workers often say that they do not have the chance to learn or share knowledge, strategies and skills between themselves.

Our earlier research also found that the training available is often unsuitable for this group of workers because it is either too basic and does not account for their specialist knowledge from their experience in mental health work; or else too advanced as it expects them to have professional qualifications. The aim of this study is to develop a way of helping support workers to share and develop their knowledge of ways of reducing resistance to care. This will be based on what we are currently learning in the ‘Helping Older People Engage in Social care project’ (or ‘HOPES 1’).

The learning will be designed following three stages:

1) Describing what the new learning will include: We will examine what has already been written about developing learning for support workers, particularly what we know about its content and structure. We will also speak to practitioners in this area to ask them what should be included in the learning, how it should be delivered and what format it should take.

2) Co-producing the learning: We will combine the findings from (1), together with learning from the HOPES 1 study, to create a new learning resource. This will be achieved through a workshop with practitioners in support work, and through discussions with service users. Follow-up interviews will allow further detailed work on what we have learned.

3) Delivering the learning: The learning will be delivered in at least one site. This will allow us to see how this works in real situations. We will explore in more depth how people feel about delivering and receiving this intervention. This will allow us to develop the learning further. By the end of this short study we will have a prototype of this learning intervention which we can make available to the social care and mental health care sectors. If the initial delivery of the intervention and prototype are found to be suitable during this project we will then conduct a more in-depth evaluation.

The HOPES 2 Study, Helping older people with mental health needs to engage with social care: Enhancing support worker skills through a prototype learning and development intervention, is led by Dr Louise Newbould and Dr Mark Wilberforce (University of York) with Dr Kritika Samsi (HSCWRU), Gill Gregory, Ewan King, Wendy Mitchell, and David Niman.

It is funded by the NIHR School for Social Care Research.