King's College London

Marking five years

Researchers at this Unit have led the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration South London’s Social Care Theme since the collaboration began in October 2019. In that time we have aimed to strengthen and support adult social care in south London and to design and implement sustainable community capacity among day services for adults accessing care and support.

We have brought together the highlights and key outputs from our five-year programme of work in this slide-deck.

Between October 2019 and September 2024, in addition to our work focusing on day centres, we have involved and engaged the social care sector and people researching social care, undertaken priority work with London Councils and supported social care capacity building through networks to widen research participation by under-represented people, implementing innovative methods, supporting the workforce to work with people living with dementia, supporting social care researchers, doing academic teaching and through involvement in the NIHR Dementia Research Programme (Dem-Comm) focusing on palliative and social care for people living with dementia.

The Social Care Theme is led by Dr Kritika Samsi, Senior Research Fellow at King's (Prof Jill Manthorpe having led the Theme until March 2023).

Next steps

We will continue the Theme’s work through a funding extension, which continues to focus on strengths-based approaches in social care and community services by researching the preventive role of at-home support services, developing involvement and engagement within the social care sector and supporting social care research capacity development. See our new study: Preventive Role of social care for Older People: triggers, judgement calls and processes (the PROP study), which is currently recruiting participants.