Developing Research Practice Partnerships to deliver novel, sustainable collaborations between adult social care research and practice in the UK

Research question: How can investment in adult social care research be optimised using a partnership approach to support improvements for people with lived experience of social care services? Background: There are many pressing questions about how to best provide adult social care (ASC) that is compassionate, responsive, acceptable, equitable, efficient and cost effective. There are research gaps and, where there is research, it often isn’t used. A promising approach to address this problem is research practice partnerships (RPPs). RPPs offer a different way of producing and mobilizing research. RPPs involve the establishment of long term partnerships between people who traditionally produce research and those who provide and access services. The partnerships engage in a range of activities including capacity building, making use of existing research and data and producing new research. They also build trust and mutual understanding to support the use of research over time. Where this approach has been tried and tested, the results look promising. Objectives: 1. Design a Research Practice Partnership approach for ASC in England 2. Establish new RPPs in ASC in England in three testbed sites 3. Evaluate what works, why and how, and in what circumstances in three RPPs in ASC in England 4. Evaluate the costs of delivering RPPs and the economic value of RPPs 5. If the results of the evaluation are positive, develop an implementation strategy to support the scale up and sustainability of an effective RPP approach for ASC in the UK. If not engage in a further cycle of redesign to feed into future studies Methods: This is a proposal for a multi-method study comprising project management and four inter-dependent work packages. In response to the call, this proposal draws together a team with the wide range of interdisciplinary expertise required to design, implement, evaluate, sustain and spread a new approach to RPPs in the care home sector in England. It focuses on establishing and evaluating novel, sustainable local partnerships between social care researchers, providers, practitioners and people with lived experience. While there has been a long tradition of partnership working between social care researchers and practitioners in the UK, there has been little rigorous evaluation of the approach to support the sustainability of partnerships and wider spread. If the approach proves to be successful, the team will consider how RPPs can become a more established part of the social care research landscape in the future. The team will be supported by an advisory group drawing on expertise in ASC service provision, people with lived experience, policy delivery and research funding and also existing RPPs. The PPI Co-applicant will coordinate involvement of people with lived experience throughout via an oversight group and participation in study events and will co-lead the design phase of the work. Timescale for delivery: This is a 48 month study Impact and dissemination: With the advisory group and people with lived experience, the team will develop an impact and dissemination plan that includes conventional dissemination (briefings, papers, blogs and a microsite), relationship building to support use of the findings (learning networks, key stakeholder mapping and engagement) and identifies and addresses systems challenges to the use of the study findings (such integration with existing structures and resourcing).