At the Forum in February

The Home Care Research Forum provides an opportunity for researchers, people working in the field and others with an interest in homecare to gather and discuss current exciting research and to establish new networks and connections.

Talk 1:

Speaker: Dr Deborah Chinn (Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Disabilities, King's College London)

Title: ‘What helps you feel at home where you live’? Exploring the concept of ‘homeliness’ with housemates with learning disabilities living in staffed group homes, their families and support staff

Summary: The Feeling at Home project (www.feelingathome.org.uk) has been funded by the NIHR School for Social Care Research with the aim of improving the everyday home environment for people with learning disabilities living together in group homes with significant staff support. We have been focusing on an important, though rather neglected aspect of residential support – how far it can help people ‘feel at home’ where they live. We used a participatory arts-based research method called photovoice to invite housemates to share experiences of their home environments through taking and discussing photographs of their homes, and we also conducted interviews with family members and staff. Our different groups of participants had different perspectives on the challenges to making sure housemates felt ‘at home’. We used our findings to create some resources that staff can use to promote homeliness in staffed group homes.

In this talk we will share our findings through the photographs and words of our participants and also reflect on how the resources we created have been tested in real world settings. Follow Deborah.

Talk 2:

Speaker: Helen Moores-Poole (Speech and Language Therapist and Clinical Doctoral Candidate, University of Stirling)

Title: What are the experiences of Home Care staff when supporting older adults with speech or swallowing difficulties, how can we help and what can we learn from these?

Summary: Helen Moores-Poole, Speech and Language Therapist and Clinical Doctoral Candidate at the University of Stirling, will be joining us to talk about her research study with homecare staff in Scotland. Helen will share early findings from her work interviewing care at home staff working as employees within council, private and third sector organisations as well as those working as self-employed personal assistants to discover how they support older adults day to day, week to week with complex swallowing or communication needs following a diagnosis of Dementia, Parkinsons, MND, Huntington’s, Multiple Sclerosis or Stroke. Her presentation will explore what staff believe helps and hinders them in their daily work and pose questions for us all about how we can better support staff to work with this highly complex client group. With thoughts around retention and recruitment, we hope this will be an interesting and thought-provoking session. Follow Helen.

This series

This event is part of the Home Care Research Forum, convened by Monica Leverton of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce. See all Policy Research Unit events.