Category Archives: Workforce

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

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Caroline NorrieCaroline 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

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Tasneem ClarkeTasneem 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?

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Jo Moriarty Nov 2014bJo 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 arMartin Stevense 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 →

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 →