Increasing Research Capacity and Improving Outcomes in Adult Social Care

The recent journal paper Increasing research capacity in adult social care: a research capacity-building partnership in Kent and its theory of change, reported on a much needed initiative to develop an adult social care research capacity-building partnership and the corresponding framework of intended change.

In 2021, the National Institute for Health and Care Research commissioned six social care capacity building partnerships between universities, local authorities, practitioners, providers, and people with lived experience to boost research into social care. As someone who has received social care for over a decade, I was super excited to learn about this. Vulnerable people need effective and proportionate care informed by lived experience and professionally grounded understandings of what this constitutes. Multi-disciplinary partnerships between key stakeholders are a must if such research is to target the most salient needs and be practicable in both its delivery and translation into practice.

The Kent Research Partnership (KRP) was one of these exciting new four-year long initiatives incorporating five interlinked streams of work, including a cross-cutting workstream focused on involving those with lived experience of adult social care. The core aims of the KRP were to identify research questions relevant to both service users and staff, augment the ability and confidence of staff to carry out research and share knowledge and tools through accessible training and workshops.

This was very good news for social care service users for a plethora of reasons. Here’s what it means in practical terms.

• The KRP prioritised co-production; actively involving people with lived experience of care in setting research priorities and shaping research questions
• Through this, the care and services being developed should be more likely to reflect the real-world needs of people using social care.
• By building a research-oriented culture among social care practitioners, the services delivered are now expected to be more evidence-based, meaning interventions are grounded in proven practices rather than intuition or outdated methods. This will hopefully help to reduce the “postcode lottery” of care and improve reliability and safety of care.
• Through research fellowships, communities of practice, and researcher-in-residence posts, frontline staff will have gained new skills, greater confidence, and the tools to critically evaluate and apply research. This was anticipated to increase motivation and job satisfaction, thereby helping to retain skilled carers and reduce human churn within social care. Ultimately this was expected to lead to better relationships between practitioners and service users and better quality and experience of care.

Within these exciting developments, the dedicated Lived Experience Working Group ensured that people drawing on care and their carers are not only participants in research but co-creators. This helped shift the power dynamics in social care research and planning, and helped build long-term trust between services and service users, especially for underrepresented groups. Furthermore, the KRP’s use of theoretical models of change including behaviour change has helped to realise clear goals, outcomes, and evaluations.

Ultimately, the KRP aimed to normalise research-informed practice across social care. For those receiving care, this meant more consistent improvement in service delivery, less reliance on trial-and-error or anecdotal practices, and a shift in the way care is viewed: from a low-priority service to a professional, valued, and evidence-based sector. This has been long overdue and above all very much welcomed.