Campaigning for more Dementia Care at Home – a carer’s call

Posted on February 19, 2018 by Stephen Martineau

U Hla Htay is a former carer of his wife with dementia. Email: uhlahtay9@gmail.com (964 words)

I am involved in many research studies as someone with experience as a family carer. In this role I have come to understand that practitioners in health and social care can limit some of the negative effects of family caregiving on carers’ health. Some of them can use interventions such as therapy to increase family carers’ physical health and spiritual well-being. Improving carer well-being and increasing our ability to care for our family members is likely to increase quality of life for both carers and our family member (World Health Organization, 2012).

Mittelman and colleagues (2007) found managing the care of a relative with dementia is very lonely, time consuming and difficult, nevertheless, most of the family members they interviewed said they would prefer to keep their spouses at home with them for as long as possible. In my view the quality of life of both someone with dementia and family carers is generally better at home. These aspirations are achievable but come with a cost in human terms and financial terms. Most people with dementia want to remain living independently in their own homes as long as possible and to have a good quality of life and end of life. I am pleased to be supporting the new NIDUS (New Intervention for independence in Dementia) Study (being conducted by Claudia Cooper and colleagues) which is being funded by the Alzheimer’s Society.¹ The Social Care Workforce Research Unit is a partner in this study with other universities. Continue reading →

Who wants to be an Approved Mental Health Professional?

Posted on July 17, 2017 by

As the Unit embarks on a new piece of Department of Health commissioned research examining the role of the Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP), Stephen Martineau and colleagues report from the AMHP Leads Network conference, held in London last week (10 July), and map out some of the background to the study. (977 words)

AMHPs carry out a variety of tasks when it comes to the use of compulsion under the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA). Chief among these is coordinating the assessment under the MHA of individuals whose mental disorder is such that it fulfils the statutory criteria; the application for a formal admission to a hospital must be ‘founded’ on medical recommendation, as the pink form for a detention under the MHA has it, but the AMHP takes the decision.[1]

Form A2 Section 2 appl by AMHP for admiss for assess-page-001

Form A2. Section 2 MHA: application by an approved mental health professional for admission for assessment (photo links to pdf)

Of course, this is only the very barest description of what is involved in the job: last week, someone who had been the subject of a MHA assessment by an AMHP wrote vividly of the experience in Community Care. Elsewhere, the Masked AMHP has asked, and answered, the question: What is an AMHP?

In making a MHA assessment of a person, AMHPs bring to bear a ‘social perspective’. And it is social workers—initially under the MHA, Approved Social Workers (ASWs)—who have been historically associated with the role. But in 2008 ASWs became AMHPs, and with the change in designation came a loosening of the ties to the social work profession: it was now also possible for certain kinds of nurses, occupational therapists and psychologists to take up the role. Continue reading →

Researching in care homes – what was learnt from a study of handovers?

Posted on July 12, 2017 by

Caroline Norrie is Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London (330 words)

What can researchers of care services learn from our recent handover study? We asked ourselves this question and discussed this at the annual conference of the British Society of Gerontology held in Swansea last week (pictured below is the new beach side campus) at the start of July. Our paper summarised the findings of our unique exploration into handovers in care homes and then we paused to ask what could be relevant to other researchers studying care home practice and systems. Continue reading →

Mental Health Workers – We need your help for our research

Posted on April 19, 2017 by

Tasneem Clarke, Research Officer at the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, based at King’s College London, discusses the Institute’s latest research, which asks: what can mental health practitioners do to support people in financial difficulty? Please take this two minute quiz to register your interest and help her come up with pragmatic solutions to this difficult issue. (736 words)

Money and mental health – a toxic relationship

As practitioners in mental health services know, life can be messy. The people we work with are rarely only facing one issue; from relationship breakdown to past traumas, economic disadvantage or long-term physical and mental health problems – issues interweave and make each other worse. 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 →

Imagining the future – the social care workforce

Posted on August 15, 2016 by

Martin Stevens is Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at the Policy Institute at King’s. (1,593 words)

A new report from the Centre for Workforce Intelligence: Forecasting the Adult Social Care Workforce to 2035 was launched at an event on the 27 July. This report asks some key questions and offers some possible answers. What will social care look like in 2035? Who will be doing the work? How many people will be needed to keep care and support services going? Social care seems to like such forecasts, a previous report by Skills for Care in 2011 estimated that the number of jobs in the adult social care sector would need to grow from around 1.6 million in 2010, to 2.8 million in 2025 in order to meet projected demand for social care support. Only last year the Centre for Workforce Intelligence (2015) forecasted a 33 per cent growth in demand by 2030. Continue reading →

Men? Have your circumstances changed?

Posted on June 25, 2015 by

Dr Valerie Lipman is Honorary Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit. (553 words)

We don’t see much about the lives of older men in the field of social care. The focus tends to be on older women, partly because women’s life expectancy is longer and perhaps, because in the care field, women are more visible in the traditional care settings, such as day centres and care homes. ‘Have your circumstances changed?’, a triptych of duets between an ageing man and a boy of about 10-12 years of age, stages the daily routine of a single older man.

The three short pieces, about 15 minutes each, are set in sequence in a kitchen, living room and bathroom, showing a different older man managing life on his own. The performance takes place in the windows of a former furniture shop in a former shopping mall in Islington, north London. There’s no dialogue but just a series of noises of daily living. In the kitchen the man accidentally tips his rice crispies all over the floor, the sink gurgles, he thumps his knife into an onion, and butter splutters in a frying pan on the cooker all against the background of Radio 2. In the living room the TV blares out quiz shows, football and the Generation Game. And in the bathroom we hear the toilet flush, medicines fall out of the cabinet and imagine the scraping of shaving and the sizzing of false teeth in the glass. Continue reading →

Helping quality improvement in social care – listening to Registered Social Care Managers’ voices

Posted on June 4, 2015 by

Caroline Norrie (left) and Michelle Cornes are, respectively, Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit. (735 words)

Members of the Cumbria Registered Social Care Managers Network (CRSCMN) met recently to discuss what support is needed to help social care services make quality improvements in care homes and domiciliary care agencies.

Care home and home care managers were joined by a representative from Care Sector Alliance Cumbria who has responsibility for the recruitment and retention element of workforce development in this rural county. Michelle Cornes from the Social Care Workforce Research Unit (SCWRU) is Facilitator of the CRSCMN. SCWRU researcher Caroline Norrie, who has recently been working on two projects about adult safeguarding including whole-home investigations, also attended. Continue reading →

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