Formative evaluation of a new resource for social care service users, teachers, practitioners and policymakers

Introduction

People’s accounts of what it is really like to use care services, or seek care for a family member, can help to support and inform others and guide social care providers in training to understand what matters to users. These descriptions of care experiences can also help those who design and deliver services to be more user-centred. Developing a new, public facing online resource (SocialCareTalk.org) adapted from a well-established, multiple award-winning website called Healthtalk.org, could support this.

Such a website for social care would feature analysis of dozens of interviews, collected throughout the country by researchers, and include hundreds of video, audio and written clips from these interviews to illustrate the analysis and give insight into experiences of care.

Objectives

The overall aim of this study is to find out what various groups of ‘users’ (professional and public) think of a website with findings and clips from research interviews about experiences of social care, and to develop and revise the website following feedback to create, launch and disseminate the new SocialCareTalk.org (SCT).

Methods

This study involves:

• exploring what service users and social care practitioners think of the HealthTalk resource, how it might be used and how it might be adapted for social care
• developing ‘catalyst’ films to start conversations with social care practitioners, and how they can be used for training and service improvement
• understanding the needs of social work and/or social care educators and how the new SCT platform could be optimised for teaching
• compiling and implementing recommended changes to the new web platform
• developing ideas about how to make sure that people find out about the web platform.