Social work training or social work education? An approach to curriculum design

Population ageing, economic circumstances, and human behaviour are placing social welfare systems under great strain. In England extensive reform of the social work profession is taking place. Training curricula are being redesigned in the context of new standards of competence for social workers – the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF). Students must be equipped on qualifying to address an extensive range of human problems, presenting major challenges to educators. Critical theory suggests an approach to tackle one such challenge – selecting the essential content required for areas of particular practice. Teaching on social work with older people is used to illustrate this. Habermas’ theory of cognitive interests highlights the different professional roles served by the social work knowledge base - instrumental, interpretive, and emancipatory. Howe’s application of sociological theory distinguished four social work roles corresponding to these. It is suggested that curriculum design decisions must enable practitioners to operate in each. When preparing students to work with older people, educators therefore need to include interpretive and emancipatory perspectives, and not construct social work purely as an instrumental response to problems older people present. This approach provides one useful rationale for curriculum design decisions, which is applicable to other areas of practice, and to contexts outside England

The SCEiP project …. And six lessons (to date…)

About 29 months ago we set out to revolutionise the way in which knowledge was exchanged in social care, particularly between researchers and professionals… OK not quite what we were officially intending; we just wanted to explore what worked and how to remove the barriers that seemed to exist (or where believed by some to exist perhaps), and – with any luck – move from talking to action

Musings about involvement in research…

Almost every research funding application will now have a section asking about involvement, be it “patient and public involvement”, “public involvement” or “user, carer, practitioner involvement”

Social Care Research in Action – An ‘unconference’ at the LSE on 19 October 2012

Social care practitioners are keen to influence the research agenda but also want help and guidance on how to access and implement its findings; researchers want to understand how their work could better influence the decision-making processes in social care and how best to communicate complex research results

Data linkage errors in hospital administrative data when applying a pseudonymisation algorithm to paediatric intensive care records.

OBJECTIVES: Our aim was to estimate the rate of data linkage error in Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) by testing the HESID pseudoanonymisation algorithm against a reference standard, in a national registry of paediatric intensive care records. SETTING: The Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) database, covering 33 paediatric intensive care units in England, Scotland and Wales. PARTICIPANTS: Data from infants and young people aged 0-19 years admitted between 1 January 2004 and 21 February 2014. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: PICANet admission records were classified as matches (records belonging to the same patient who had been readmitted) or non-matches (records belonging to different patients) after applying the HESID algorithm to PICANet records. False-match and missed-match rates were calculated by comparing results of the HESID algorithm with the reference standard PICANet ID. The effect of linkage errors on readmission rate was evaluated. RESULTS: Of 166,406 admissions, 88,596 were true matches (where the same patient had been readmitted). The HESID pseudonymisation algorithm produced few false matches (n=176/77,810; 0.2%) but a larger proportion of missed matches (n=3609/88,596; 4.1%). The true readmission rate was underestimated by 3.8% due to linkage errors. Patients who were younger, male, from Asian/Black/Other ethnic groups (vs White) were more likely to experience a false match. Missed matches were more common for younger patients, for Asian/Black/Other ethnic groups (vs White) and for patients whose records had missing data. CONCLUSIONS: The deterministic algorithm used to link all episodes of hospital care for the same patient in England has a high missed match rate which underestimates the true readmission rate and will produce biased analyses. To reduce linkage error, pseudoanonymisation algorithms need to be validated against good quality reference standards. Pseudonymisation of data 'at source' does not itself address errors in patient identifiers and the impact these errors have on data linkage.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), grant number ES/F035098/1

In adults with multimorbidity, does the provision of social care services have an effect on the use of primary care and secondary care health services?

Objectives: Health and social care is an area of high policy importance in the UK. Integration of health boards with local authority provided social care in Scotland in 2016 is a major structural change in delivery of care. Improvements in service and efficiency are expected and indeed required in an era of declining budgets. Intuitively, health and social care are closely linked, particularly for those with multiple morbidities. However, little is known about the relationship between health and social care services and how usage of one has an impact on the other in terms of outcomes and costs. The study aims to describe the methods that have been used to analyse the relationship between social care, primary care and secondary care services. Findings will inform the analysis of a large linked dataset of health care, social care and benefits data that will investigate the interactions between health and social care, multimorbidity and socioeconomic status. Approach: A Scoping review of literature aiming to identify academic studies that have made an assessment of the relationship between health care and social care. A search of academic databases will be augmented by a search of grey literature aiming to identify the extent, range and nature of studies. Data will be extracted on populations, study designs, results and recommendations. Results will be visualised in charts alongside a descriptive qualitative synthesis. Results: Expected June 2016

A balancing act? Academic impact versus practice impact? Really?

In considering all of the issues and queries that have arisen throughout the SCEiP project, perhaps one of the ones that still surprises me is the “but I can’t do both” statement. The idea that it’s not possible to achieve both academic and practice impact, and that researchers have to focus on activities to generate one or the other, but can’t manage both