Bringing it all together – re-valuing older people by combining research, training and practice

Posted on March 31, 2017 by

Valerie Lipman is a Postdoc Intern at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s College London.

Here’s a challenge for learning institutes in the UK: how can they deliver on-site direct services for the vulnerable groups whom they’re studying and promoting? I talked to Dr Indrani Chakravarty, the founder and Director, of the Calcutta Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology (CMIG) about her experience of doing just this and how she marries research with real practice. Continue reading →

Adult Social Care – where’s the evidence?

Posted on February 13, 2017 by

Jo Moriarty and Martin Stevens are Senior Research Fellows at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit. (1,192 words)

People often talk about the absence of a social care evidence base, but ‘patchy’ is a far better description. Until we are more explicit about this, it will be difficult to make progress in achieving evidence based policy and practice. We took part in two Meet the Researcher sessions at an event jointly organised by Research in Practice for Adults (RIPfA), the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS). They were part of a day-long seminar designed to bring Directors and Assistant Directors of Adult Social Care and researchers together to discuss current and future adult social care research. Continue reading →

Discharged home with no home to go to

Posted on August 24, 2016 by

Peer research is a distinct type of service user involvement extending the expertise of lived experience into research. In peer research people with direct experience are involved in designing, delivering and shaping research (Revolving Doors, 2016).The Homelessness Research Programme at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit is currently running two research projects involving peer researchers. The first is looking at specialist primary care and the second at hospital discharge arrangements for homeless people. Both projects recently ran training and induction days for their peer researchers. In this blog James Fuller and Alan Kilmister (Peer Researchers on the Hospital Discharge Project) describe how they became involved in peer research, how their experience can make a difference and why striving for impact and change must be at the heart of this kind of participatory methodology. (1,372 words)

James: I am currently working as a support worker in a ‘day centre’ for homeless people in London. The main motive for throwing myself into the hospital discharge research project is a strong sense of righteous indignation at the way the people who use our service are routinely returned there by hospital staff who should know we have no accommodation – the clue is in our title!

One man has been delivered to our car park three times this year, on two occasions in a taxi, always clutching his transparent bag of medicines and still wearing his ward wristband. All we can do is get him to see our wonderful specialist nurse at the earliest opportunity (she can only fit us in one day a week) and use our best first-aiding to tend any wounds.

In the dark days I was myself discharged from hospital detox onto the street, which meant I couldn’t access even daytime rehabs, not having a secure address in what had been my local borough for more than five years. I was back in detox six months later. In the interim I was put out of the Emergency Investigation Unit of a well-known London hospital in pretty short order and with nowhere to go. Such experiences stick in the mind. Continue reading →

Let’s Talk – Piloting an educational drama in a care home

Posted on August 11, 2015 by

Caroline Norrie (left) and Michelle Cornes are, respectively, Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit. (666 words)

A Transformative Research Fund grant has been awarded to researchers from the Social Care Workforce Research Unit (SCWRU) at King’s College London to pilot an educational drama initiative in a care home in Cumbria. Care home staff, multi-agency colleagues (such as GPs and physiotherapists) and residents will hopefully volunteer to take part in a drama called Let’s Talk, which is designed to stimulate discussion about working relationships. As well as piloting the drama, three interprofessional, reflective ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP) meetings will be held which will act as a forum to discuss care home practices and ideas for change. Continue reading →

What do we know about managers of care homes?

Posted on December 23, 2014 by

Katharine Orellana is a Research Training Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. Katharine’s Care Home Managers: a scoping review of evidence is published today by NIHR School for Social Care Research. (589 words)

We have a tendency to put care home managers at the back of our minds until a crisis hits the headlines. On such sad occasions, there is suddenly a lot of interest in them.

In England, around 460,000 adults live in 17,350 care homes that have a staff body of around 560,000. Care homes are hugely varied in many ways. They range from small, family businesses to large national and multinational chains offering anything from 1 – 215 beds. Homes may cater for more than one group of people, but they all provide accommodation and personal care. Just over a quarter of them also offer nursing, and these account for about half of all places in care homes as they tend to be larger operations. Staff must support residents with increasingly complex needs. Continue reading →

The challenges of mental health for social science and policy

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Stephen Martineau

Guntars Ermansons, student in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, introduces a report on a workshop held earlier this summer. See the full report of the workshop. (309 words)

On 19 June 2014, a workshop on “The Challenges of Mental Health for Social Science and Policy” was held at King’s College London, Waterloo Campus. Supported by the King’s Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre’s Science & Society initiative and organized by the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, in collaboration with the Institute of Psychiatry and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, the workshop hosted a number of distinguished speakers and experts on mental health and involved postgraduate and early career researchers. Continue reading →

Risks and barriers to organisations conducting research

Posted on July 18, 2014 by

by Martin Stevens, Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. (2,114 words)

The Health Research Authority (HRA) is currently consulting on various aspects of research regulation in health and social care in preparation for replacing the Research Governance Framework (RGF). The Social Care Workforce Research Unit (SCWRU) has had a long involvement with the implementation of Research Governance in social care and has made a response to part of this consultation. The HRA is currently asking ‘What are the risks to research because of perceived risks of research? and has published a report explaining its proposed approach. There is much with which we agree in the consultation report, specifically:

the focus on clear and consistent definitions of terms;
the emphasis on collaboration;
the promotion of sound arrangements between the different organisations involved in research;
the promotion of a quality research culture, within research organisations and also in care organisations; and,
the need for more explicit support for a high quality research culture.

However, despite the focus on good collaboration and the need to involve all stakeholders, the document needs to better reflect the experiences of social care researchers, and those responsible for research governance in local authorities. Continue reading →

Following a pathway to impact

Posted on June 23, 2014 by

Valerie Lipman

The Social Care Workforce Research Unit is part of the Policy Institute @ King’s, which is furthering the cause of evidence-informed policy and practice. Valerie Lipman, a social gerontologist and a postdoc Intern at the Unit, reports on an event which examined the questions that arise where academia, funders, policy-makers, and practitioners meet.

I went to a great panel discussion last week: ‘The impact of impact: who are we researching for?’. The event, the last of the year organised by KISS-DTC* was moderated by BBC journalist Mark Easton. Lots of talking about the history of research, its purpose, why do we do it, what’s meant to happen to it when done, and who cares? And that for me is the critical question. Who cares, or rather who do I want to care about the research I’ve done? Why would you bother doing social science research unless you wanted something to be different as a result? This view has been the order of the day for some time now, and the proof is in how money is made available for research, and the ability of those carrying out the research to disseminate and inform others.

From their different perspectives three panellists presented the case about why impact matters. In the academic corner we had Dame Janet Finch, chair of the social sciences panel for the REF, arguing a strong moral case that researchers have a responsibility to make their research available and that the ‘impact’ element of the REF is here to stay. Aileen Murphie, Director, DCLG & Local Government VFM, promoted the need for evidence-based policy, though as members of the audience argued this can result in favouring government priorities occluding an openness to new ideas. And representing a position between the academic and government worlds was Anthony Tomei, former Director of the Nuffield Foundation: the voice of independence, risk taker in what research to support and an advocate of the importance of quality research that can effect change.

The time when research was allowed to be an expression of freedom and a search for the new—an opportunity to delve into the unknown and emerge with the prize that would change the thinking and actions of others to make a better world—seems to have passed. On the other hand I’ve worked with people in university research departments who’ve never thought about what the purpose of their research was. It was the job of others to interpret the findings and take it further. Obviously, you shouldn’t know the answers to the questions before you start the research or skew your questions to meet what you want it to show—’policy-based evidence’ as someone at the meeting described it. But there must be a way of deciding at the start that you’ll want the results of the research to matter, so how about building in processes at the outset that stimulate debate as you go along … following a ‘pathway to impact’, as Janet Finch said, not merely waiting till the obligatory conference and a couple of academic papers at the end?

Valerie Lipman was recently awarded a PhD by the Centre for Ageing at the University of Southampton. She is a postdoc Intern at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, developing material from her doctorate for publication here at King’s.

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*KISS-DTC = King’s Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre

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