Research: Using co-design to improve social care
Designing quality social care services by capturing, understanding and using people’s experiences.
Summary
Research summary
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April 2020 – January 2023
The project seeks to improve the quality of social care by better capturing, understanding and using people’s experiences of loneliness.
It aims to help local authorities find new ways to collect and use data to improve service design.
We want to see if a co-design approach used to improve services in healthcare could have the same success in social care.
We focus on loneliness because it is experienced by many people and can significantly impact their health and quality of life. While there are community initiatives to tackle feelings of isolation, there is little evidence to show how effective they are.
Objectives
We aim to understand whether a co-design approach used to improve the quality of healthcare is suitable for use in social care.
Methodology
In the first stage of the project, we will:
- interview:
- a diverse sample of up to 50 people who experience loneliness
- 20 social care and related staff discussing ways services can better tackle loneliness
- analyse the interviews to identify the critical moments for tackling loneliness
- produce a 20-25 minute film, including audio and video clips from the interviews
In the second phase, we will work with Doncaster City Council to test whether a co-design process used in the NHS works in social care.
We will:
- run separate workshops with staff and social care users, followed by a joint screening of the film
- support participants to discuss and agree priorities for improving services
- monitor services for nine months to study how improvements are made
Expected outcomes and outputs
The project will help local authorities find new ways of collecting and using data about people’s experiences of social care to improve service design and quality.
We will produce:
- recommendations for how to use this approach
- a section on loneliness on socialcaretalk.org, based on analysis of the interviews and including around 250 film, audio and text extracts
- conference presentations
- a new collection of interviews for the Health Experiences Research Group data archive, which will be available for secondary analysis
- an end of project event
- three academic papers
Research output
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Academic papers, reports and other research outputs will be linked from here when they are published.
Team
Research team
Lead researcher
Co-applicants
- Dr Angela Martin, University of Oxford
- Dr Kate Baxter, University of York
- Dr Mark Wilberforce, University of York
- Adam Barnett, Dipex Charity
- Ahmed Lambat, LMCP Care Link
- Louise Robson, Doncaster City Council
- Pam Bebbington, My Life My Choice
- Prof Louise Locock, University of Aberdeen
- Prof Sue Ziebland, University of York
- Prof Yvonne Birks, University of York
Funding
With funding from
National Institute Health Research
Contact
Contact us
For general enquiries, you can contact the Health, Psychology and Communities research centre.
