Project Title:
Determining Best Preventative Social Care Practice (DBPSCP Study)
Research Leads:
Dr Simon Read
Research Members and collaborations:
- Professor Fiona Verity – Brunel University
- Professor Mark Llewellyn – University of South Wales
- Dr Gideon Calder – Swansea University
- Professor Jonathan Richards – University of South Wales
Funder(s): Health and Care Research Wales
Funding amount: £299,992
Project start date: 01/10/2021
Project end date: 31/03/2025
Introduction:
This study explores prevention in social care and support. Specifically, we are examining how the idea of prevention is understood and enacted within a sample of regions across Wales. We will be looking particularly at how these issues impact on older people receiving care and support at home, and those living with dementia.
Background:
Prevention has increasingly become a central principle for health and care services across the UK. Legislatively this has taken the shape of the Care Act in England or the Social Services and Well-being Act in Wales; each making prevention a statutory obligation for governments to enact. Yet, recent research has highlighted how this legislative drive often incorporates a ‘definitional slipperiness’ that sees prevention linked to multiple agendas all at once: individual well-being; system partnership working; community development and resilience; statutory cost-saving, and financial imperatives to name a few. Not all these agendas sit easily alongside one another, though, meaning that there is scope for multiple interpretations of prevention particularly for the social care context, and for older people.
Study methods and activities:
The study will adopt six research phases with the subsequent findings contributing to the development of a best practice prevention toolkit. This will offer social care professionals an evidence-based perspective on how preventative social care should best be conceptualised, defined and enacted, as well as the factors associated with best practice.
Based on current evidence of existing inconsistency in this area, the first Phases of research will focus on how prevention is currently interpreted and implemented within each of our sampled regions, how this has taken shape, and where current prevention activity is felt to fit within the working model of prevention outlined in the Social Services and Well-being Act (Wales) 2014. An overview of this model is outlined in Box 1.
| Definition | Primary prevention activities are directed at the general population and attempt to stop problems before they occur. | Secondary prevention activities with a high-risk focus are offered to populations that have risk factors associated with particular problems. | Tertiary prevention activities focus on where problems have already occurred and seek to reduce the negative consequences of problems and prevent their recurrence. |
Box 1: Definitions of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Prevention
Subsequently, through observations and interviews with regional services staff, we will explore how health boards, local authorities, third sector, voluntary and private organisations interact with one another to enable preventative working in their region. We will also observe how preventative services interact with their service users, as well as interview both service users and their carers about the care and support they receive or give. This work will look to establish how, and in what ways, those using the services feel they help to prevent poorer health or well-being outcomes. In doing so, the study will unpack issues associated with translating prevention policy into everyday reality for service users, identifying examples of successful and unsuccessful practice, and the conditions influencing this.
Findings:
Study ongoing
Further information:
NIHR Online Seminar: Prevention in Social Care (Insights from Welsh research)
Social Inclusion article on prevention and community development in Wales