Adult social care needs assessment and care planning
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The NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme is calling for research to evaluate the effectiveness, implementation, and impact of social care needs assessment in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Programme wants to fund research which will support improvements in timely, appropriate, holistic, and transparent social care needs assessments, which in turn will lead to improved support for those needing social care services. The programme is therefore, interested in receiving applications for cross-UK studies including natural experiments, aiming to produce generalisable and actionable findings. The main aim of this call is to deliver an evaluation of implementation, variation of practice and experiences of social care needs assessments.
The main aim of this call is to deliver an evaluation of implementation, variation of practice and experiences of social care needs assessments and care planning. The experiences element relates to people who use these assessments such as people with disability, long-term illness, or mental health as well as the experiences of people who support those who use these assessments such as their friends, family, and carers.
Little is known about how assessments to determine a person’s eligibility for social care are being undertaken, what variations exists between local authorities and how this is impacting on access and outcomes for people in need of support.
Research in this area has the potential to optimise the quality and consistency of social care needs assessments and care planning across the UK. This will affect the experience of service users using these assessments and care planning including their support network, and health and care professionals delivering these assessments. Social care needs assessments and care planning approaches tailored to individual needs (rather than adoption of a standardised “one size fits all” approach) are likely to have a positive health impact and therefore will likely be beneficial to other parts of the health and care system.
The NIHR HSDR Programme is likely to fund more than one study in this area, taking account of the following broad areas of uncertainty identified by stakeholders including social care practitioners, service leaders and those using care services. Research looking into experiences of self-funders and those funded by the local authority are both within the scope of this call. Areas of interest highlighted include:
There are no set methods or designs for research in this area, but research might take the form of longitudinal studies, using observational methods to track people in receipt of care, as well as case study methods. There is also likely to be a need to employ quantitative methods with a robust plan of analysis, synthesising all findings to provide a coherent output which will be actionable and generalisable.
Further details are set out on the NIHR’s website at https://www.nihr.ac.uk/funding/2210-adult-social-care-needs-assessment-and-care-planning/29740.