More research needed

We are lucky to be working with some great academics at Kent University’s PSSRU, who are carrying out the first major research into the cost-effectiveness and impact of Shared Lives in recent times. You’ll find summaries of two ongoing pieces of research on our website with Cabinet Office funded evaluations of family carer support and mental health care coming soon. Kent University have also researched outcomes for older people and designed an outcome measuring tool which we’ve made available to all of our member organisations, and which is starting to gather a national dataset of information on the outcomes which people achieve in Shared Lives. A key feature of this tool is that enables people to say whether Shared Lives has a positive, negative or no impact on a number of areas of their lives and wellbeing. I think that being prepared for unintended negative consequences of care and health interventions is a key step towards getting a rounded picture of the contribution that support makes to living a good life. We’re confident that the tool will show the positive impacts that people tell us about constantly, but where there is variation, it will enable us to work with local organisations to improve.

We have just started a conversation with another university about Homeshare, which is also being evaluated by the Social Care Institute for Excellence as part of the £2m Big Lottery and Lloyds Bank Foundation funded national partnership. However, both Shared Lives and Homeshare remain under-researched compared to other sectors. Here are some of the things we’d love to know, or be able to prove, which are not yet being researched:

1. What are the ‘preventative’ outcomes of Homeshare? How can Homeshare make the most impact upon people being able to live well for longer in their own homes?
2. The cost-benefit of Shared Lives breaks and day support: most of the research at the moment looks at live-in arrangements, but this is only half of Shared Lives provision.
3. What motivates Shared Lives carers? Some local organisations have a handful of Shared Lives carers, whilst others have hundreds. Shared Lives schemes appear to experience very small turnover of Shared Lives carers compared to other forms of care. We need to know more about who to reach, how to reach them and what best motivates people to take the huge step of becoming a Shared Lives carers, and to stop. We think we know, but it’s never been ‘properly’ researched.
4. What impact does Shared Lives have on the rest of the household? We hear lovely stories from the children of Shared Lives carers: it would be great to collect more of their stories and understand their and other family members’ experiences and contributions in more detail.
5. We know that matches can last a lifetime, but what factors make some matches last decades and what leads to the small number of matches which break down and what happens to people post-Shared Lives? There may be no ‘typical’ length of a Shared Lives arrangement: some people want to use Shared Lives as a stepping stone to their own place and others are looking for somewhere to settle down forever. What goes in to some matches being able to continue even when the individual develops complex health needs: the role of the Shared Lives household but also the local organisation and partner agencies?