Welcome to the IMPACT Director’s Update bulletin. Jon Glasby has been the Director of IMPACT since 2021, when the centre officially launched – he is a qualified social worker and Professor of Health and Social Care. This new monthly update will allow Jon, and colleagues across IMPACT, to share key highlights, milestones, and learning. Read on to find out what we got up to in April, as IMPACT welcomed international colleagues from around the globe to Birmingham for the International Conference on Integrated Care 2026.
IMPACT welcomes the world – ICIC Conference 2026
Earlier this month, IMPACT helped to host over 1,000 health and social care colleagues from 55 different countries at the International Conference on Integrated Care. Our Demonstrator lead, Robin Miller, brought the 2026 event to Birmingham, with IMPACT serving as a ‘knowledge partner’, helping to shape overall themes and the programme, while providing a series of inputs and workshops. Through IMPACT’s contribution, there was a much greater profile for social care research and innovation than previous conferences.
In particular, the focus was on developing joined-up responses to the needs of diverse communities – and we contributed by co-chairing the opening plenary on the lessons from and for England’s 10-year NHS Plan; leading interactive workshops on international lessons around implementing evidence in practice, and how neighbourhood working could ‘do with’, not ‘do for’, communities; and sitting on panels sharing learning from developments in the UK, Germany and Finland. We also shared numerous examples from our work, including social work with older people in Walsall, supporting people to live well with dementia, developing a research culture in occupational therapy, the lived experience of care-experienced adults, the intimate lives of people with learning disabilities, the work of IMPACT ‘Networks’, and much, much more.
Robin was also able to organise visits to a series of different community-led organisations and innovations across Birmingham, and to an art exhibition by the Ikon gallery on ‘creative health’ at the Library of Birmingham – showcasing a piece from our research which amplifies the voices of people with learning disabilities stuck in long-stay hospitals, and forms the basis of an IMPACT ‘Network’.
This was a fantastic three-day event in its own right, helping to share our learning across borders and boundaries. However, it’s just one example of the work we do – above and beyond our core mission – to make sure we keep challenging and widening our thinking, and to prevent us from becoming too internally-focused.
Learning from international colleagues
When we first started to bid for funding to set up IMPACT, we began by visiting two key European centres – the Swedish Family Care Competence Centre (Nka) and the National Centre of Expertise for Long-term Care in the Netherlands (Vilans). Nka kindly shared their work on ‘blended learning networks’ (very generously translating all their materials and evaluations from Swedish) – and these were adapted for a UK context to become our IMPACT ‘Networks’. Vilans hosted us for several days, introducing us to different members of staff and helping us to think through the potential design and ethos of our own centre.
When we set up our governance, we made sure that we included a ‘Critical Friends’ group with members from other sectors in the UK and from similar centres internationally) to continue to support and challenge our thinking. Over time, we got to work in more depth with several of these as we shared learning from our different nations – for example, on the neglect of adult social care during COVID. In 2023 our colleagues at the University of Sheffield also hosted the International Transforming Care Conference, welcoming over 400 delegates from 36 different countries. This included an IMPACT-led symposium that shared lessons from different national centres of excellence and explored the role of lived experience in driving change.
In April 2024, colleagues at Ulster University hosted the International Foundation of Integrated Care conference, with IMPACT’s Deirdre Heenan as Chair of the Scientific Committee.
More recently, we had the privilege of sharing our work as a keynote address to a national network of people with lived experience, researchers, practitioners and policy makers seeking to reform Australian mental health services (the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation). We’re now part of the next 5 years of ALIVE’s work, after they won $10m (Aus) to transform national mental health and well-being and included IMPACT ‘Demonstrators’ as part of their 2024-29 work programme – our first substantive foray ‘Down Under.’
Most UK colleagues will know us through their work with us locally, regionally and nationally – and all this activity is just added value, above and beyond our main role. However, hopefully it’s helpful to know that we’re forging these links behind the scenes so that we remain critical in our thinking and approach, so that the contribution we make in the UK is informed by and tested against developments elsewhere, and so that we’re sharing good practice from across the UK with others.
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Thank you for reading.
Jon