Background: Efforts to build and foster adult social care research in England have historically encountered more challenges to its growth and expansion compared with health research, with a sector facing significant barriers in facilitating research activity due to a lack of resourcing, poor valuation or understanding of the profile of social care research. The landscape for supporting research in adult social care has been rather bleak, but in recent years there has been recognition of the need to foster a research community. The National Institute for Health and Care Research in England have committed to investing in social care research capacity by funding six adult social care partnerships, with one based in Southeast England.
Process developing communities of practice cops: Three large online networking events were held in the first year of the project to engage managers and practitioners from the local authority and from the wider adult social care sector. These took place in July and November 2021, with a last event in March 2022. Two COPs were identified, following an ordering and thematising process of feedback from the networking events, of: (a) Supporting people with complex needs throughout the lifespan, and (b) Enhancing, diversifying and sustaining the social care workforce. Whilst it would be premature to identify their long-term impacts, through the facilitation of 20 COP meetings held so far, alongside the engagement platforms and enrichment resources, these have provided a space for regular communication in the sector, knowledge sharing and networking between COP members.
Conclusions: The COP framework offers a collaborative approach to initiating research from the grass-roots level in adult social care. This paper focuses on how the COP model offers great promise for knowledge-exchange providing a forum to generate and disseminate knowledge around social care in our two COP domains.
Keywords: capacity building; communities of practice; shared learning; social care research.
Social care research looks into how care and support is delivered enabling people to continue to be independent, keep their dignity and help them achieve a better quality of life. The social care sector is responsible for delivering services and are provided by local authorities, third or private sector organisations. Research in adult social care is important to help the social care workforce understand which approaches and interventions work and how to improve the quality of care and support. However, there are barriers with setting up and running a research study in the social care sector, including limited dedicated time for the social care workforce to do research, accessing participants through providers, commissioners or unpaid carers, and due to the fragmented nature of the sector, difficulties in facilitating or supporting research. There are few opportunities for the social care workforce to develop their skills and experiences to undertake their own research. In order to help the social care workforce foster a culture of research and learning, we have used a well-known group learning and sharing framework called Communities of Practice (COPs) to help generate a culture of research involving all providers and users of social care. We developed the COPs by inviting them to three online networking events to identify what topics of research are important to providers and users. Their ideas were then put into themes and discussed, and two areas were finally decided upon for the COPs of: (a) Supporting people with complex needs throughout the lifespan, and (b) Enhancing, diversifying and sustaining the social care workforce. The COPs provide a place for users and providers to meet and discuss what research is important to them to identify some potential solutions to the problems encountered in adult social care.
Copyright: © 2023 Hashem F et al.