Our research is organised into five key programme areas
Programme A: prevention and promotion
Core question: How can we best prevent or reduce the development or exacerbation of circumstances that lead to the need for social care?
Are there arrangements, circumstances, processes or interventions that can help to avoid individuals reaching a situation where social care is needed; or that respond early in order to lessen unwanted longer-term exacerbation of 'problems' or needs; or that help individuals to re-integrate themselves into their family, community and societal roles. Assessing the impacts of such interventions is methodologically challenging and a variety of projects might be needed to build up an understanding of 'what works', how it is experienced and with what resource implications.
Programme B: empowerment and safeguarding
Core question: How can we best empower and safeguard people who use social care services?
The success of personalisation lies in the achievement of a successful balance between choice, control and flexibility, on the one hand, and, on the other, security and safeguarding. This second programme of work will address areas of concern such as the balance of rights and risks in care and support; and the balance between flexibility and security. The roles of families, carers and formal support organisations in helping manage these balances will be of particular interest.
Programme C: care and work
Core questions: How can we best equip and support people - practitioners, volunteers, informal carers - to provide optimum social care? How can we ensure that people who use social care and their carers are enabled and supported in paid work and other types of meaningful activity?
The relationships between care and work are multi-faceted. Important features of this programme will be its breadth across the boundaries of formal and informal care work, including the employment of relatives and friends to provide care, and the employment outcomes for both social care users and those providing care.
Programme D: service interventions, commissioning and change
Core question: What interventions, commissioning and delivery arrangements best achieve social care outcomes?
Multiple simultaneous pressures are reshaping the commissioning and delivery of adult social care services. How can service commissioning and delivery processes adapt to meet new demands for services that are both personalised and integrated? What are the impacts of decommissioning services as a result of these and longer-term trends, and how is decommissioning best managed to minimise negative consequences and make best use of resources?
Programme E: resources and interfaces
Core question: How can social care and other public resources best be deployed and combined to achieve social care outcomes?
Historically, the resources allocated to individuals in adult social care have been a function of the costs of services they are assessed as needing. Personalisation has introduced new methods of allocating resources to individuals and made levels of allocated resources more transparent.
There is an extensive evaluation agenda on the impacts, outcomes and cost-effectiveness of more flexible resource use involving social care, health care, housing, social security and other systems, both contemporaneously and over time. There is a need for research into the methods and equity implications (between groups of social care users and between localities) of different approaches to allocating resources.