Category Archives: Workforce

Social work research with adults in England: The state we’re in

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Manthorpe and Moriarty 2016 Social work research-01The adult social work sector in England needs to urgently identify its key research priorities, in an inclusive and rigorous way, if it is to generate the ideas and evidence needed to ensure that people receive the best possible support, according to researchers at the Policy Institute, King’s College London.

In a discussion paper on the state of social work research with adults in England, the researchers stress that the profession needs to be underpinned by research if it is to survive and to flourish. Among their recommendations are the establishment of a network that provides learning and mentor support for early career researchers, practitioner researchers, and managers interested in adult social work research, something that currently exists for researchers working on subjects such as ageing or in health services research. Continue reading →

Imagining the future – the social care workforce

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Dr Martin StevensMartin 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?

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Valerie LipmanDr 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 →

Social work and the ill body

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Liz Price Liz WalkerLiz Price (left) and Liz Walker both work at the University of Hull. (401 words)

Social work is remarkably silent when it comes to the physical body. By definition, the profession is similarly unnoticed within the experience, and practice, of illness. This book addresses these silences through an exploration of chronic (autoimmune) illnesses engaging in wider debates around vulnerability, resistance and the lived experience of ongoing ill-health.

We demonstrate the role that social work has to play in actively engaging the (ill) physical body, rather than working around and through it. We focus on autoimmune conditions such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and scleroderma. Conditions like these allow for an exploration of the everyday lived experience of illnesses which can exacerbate social and economic vulnerability and may precipitate personal and social crises, requiring a variety of interventions and support. Continue reading →

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

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Caroline Norrie Dr Michelle CornesCaroline 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 →

Assessing practice: the OSCE adapted for social work

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photo of Imogen Taylor

Professor Imogen Taylor, University of Sussex, reports on the first seminar in a new series hosted by the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at which she was discussant. (332 words)

Professor Marion Bogo from the University of Toronto Faculty of Social Work gave the first of the new Social Work Seminar Series at King’s College London on Tuesday 5 May on the topic of the use of the OSCE, an Objective Structured Clinical Exam, in social work.

The invited audience for this virtual seminar [these are Prof Bogo’s presentation slides] came from social work policy, education, research and practice, including key members of stakeholder groups, to hear about the use of the OSCE in North America and debate its application to social work in England.  We learned that the OSCE was initially developed in medical education in the 1970s in Scotland and has been adopted by other health related professions. In North America, it is now being piloted and researched in social work. The essence of the social work OSCE is two-fold: first, practice competence is directly observed and assessed in 15-minute simulated interviews with standardised clients/users played by actors trained to enact the role of a client scenario; second, immediately post-interview, ‘meta-competences’ are assessed  in a rating of the students’ critical reflection on their practice, how they linked theory to practice and what they planned to take forward from the experience. Continue reading →

Understanding the meaning and context of good social care support for people with learning disabilities from minority ethnic groups

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Last week Dr Gemma Unwin spoke at the Learning Disability Workshop Series run by the Social Care Workforce Research Unit and Making Research Count here at King’s. Dr Unwin and her University of Birmingham colleagues have recently completed a project that involved talking to adults with learning disabilities from minority ethnic groups in order to investigate their experiences of using social care support services. Here she introduces the study and discusses the findings. (778 words)

What we did

Thirty-two adults with mild to moderate learning disabilities from different minority ethnic groups in the West Midlands were interviewed about their understanding of ‘support’, their level of involvement with and experiences of services, their views of the support they needed, and the support they received, and the ways in which this met their goals and priorities. Interviews were sensitive to the cultural context of people’s relationship with services, using a ‘Culturegram’ or talking tool developed to help participants talk about the cultural aspects of their identities in their everyday lives. Continue reading →

View from the Frozen North

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Last July we heard from the Cumbria Registered Social Care Managers’ Network (What can the city banks learn from social care?). At their most recent meeting, Network members discussed issues associated with providing care closer to home. (732 words)

Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, braved icy conditions to attend the Cumbria Registered Social Care Managers’ Network on Friday 16 January 2015. The aim of the meeting was to explore from social care mangers’ perspectives some of the challenges of delivering care closer to home. Given the pressures currently facing the hospital acute sector and especially Accident and Emergency Departments, discussions of care closer to home are especially topical as it explores how community health and social care staff can work together to keep people out of hospital where appropriate or to help them come home earlier. Continue reading →

What do we know about managers of care homes?

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Katharine OrellanaKatharine 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 →

Shifting policy attention to the social care workforce

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Dr Shereen HusseinDr Shereen Hussein is Principal Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (956 words)

The year 2014 has seen growing attention given to the social care workforce, with a number of high profile reviews being published, including the Kingsmill Review ‘Taking Care’, the Unison report into home care ‘Time to care’, the Demos review of residential care and, launched today, the Burstow Commission review on the future of the home care workforce, ‘Key to care’.

The question of how to maintain a high quality social care workforce has received academic scrutiny for many years, with research highlighting the lack of career progression, low pay and status, and the inability of the sector to attract young and diverse groups of workers as some of the key issues. There are many reasons why we are in this state of ‘crisis’ but at the core is the assumption that care work is something that can be performed by ‘anyone’—it does not require a vast amount of skills and we can always find a willing worker to do it. While these assumptions go unspoken, they underline how the sector operates and derive from the perception of care work as ‘women’s’ work that comes ‘naturally’; if the family can do it why do we need a skilled professional to do it? Continue reading →