Social work with people aged 65+ years old

Project Background

Walsall Council wanted to work with people with lived experience and with IMPACT to find ways to deliver better outcomes for people aged 65+ and communities supported by Walsall’s Locality Teams and Intermediate Care Service.

This Demonstrator drew on the original ‘Social Work with Older People’ project funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) School for Social Care Research (SSCR). That project followed social workers across two local authorities between Autumn 2022 and Spring 2023 and demonstrated the positive difference that social workers make to the lives of older people, carers and families. It led to recommendations about how social workers can be supported, developed and deployed so that they are able to do more of what older people and families value.

The original study includes a series of resources developed by the research team in conjunction with partners such as the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and Research in Practice. The resources include a practice tool and practice briefing, a policy briefing, podcasts, reports and animations for others wanting to work on these issues. 

Alongside the insights from that project, this Demonstrator was also informed by an evidence review created when the project started in September 2024. It also continually drew on perspectives from people with lived experience, social care professionals, health, commissioning and voluntary, charity, faith and social enterprise sources to ensure decisions were evidence-informed.

Initial Evidence Review (Word)
Theory of Change

IMPACT Factfile

What improvements did the project hope to make?

IMPACT supported Walsall Council to explore different ways of working and establish effective mechanisms to apply the learning and resources developed in the NIHR-funded Social Work with Older People project. The project hoped to make improvements in the: 

  • Time, space and resilience for relationship-focused work within communities and Social Work teams  
  • Satisfaction levels with the Social Work service provision from older people within Walsall and their support networks  
  • Job satisfaction amongst Walsall Social Workers working with older people

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In November and December 2024, the Strategic Improvement Coach held planning meetings with people working in Walsall adult social care, people with lived experience living in Walsall and the co-production and lived experience associate from West Midlands Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS).

Those meetings aimed to develop a co-production approach that would support the project to clearly define what it will do to achieve the intended improvements. Through the discussions in those meetings, the Improvement Coach presented options on approaches that could be taken. In January 2025, a collective decision was made to repurpose the planning meetings to Steering Group meetings and commit to recruiting more members to ensure a strong representation of key interested parties. The project Steering Group currently includes: 

  • Experts by experience 
  • Principal Social Worker, Walsall Council
  • Head of Service, Pathway to Independence and Localities, Walsall Council 
  • Group Manager, Localities, Walsall Council
  • Co-Production Lead, Walsall Council
  • Carers Lead, Walsall Council
  • Social Workers, Walsall Council 
  • Commission Consultant, Walsall Council 
  • Voluntary Sector Representative, Walsall 
  • Co-Production Advisory Group Representative, West Midlands ADASS 
  • Academic Principal Investigator, Social Work with Older People project

The Steering Group has two key purposes, 1) to decide what the project will do (and also be clear on what it will not do), and 2) to provide support and challenge to the project team(s) (when established). On the first point, the Steering Group are supported by the IMPACT Strategic Improvement Coach to review evidence collected, contribute additional information and use both to decide which improvement idea(s) this project should pilot. When the pilot project(s) have been agreed, and a project delivery team has been created, the Steering Group will provide the project team with: 

Between October and December 2024, the Senior Strategic Improvement Coach engaged with each member of the Steering Group to generate a list of improvement ideas based on the learning from the original Social Work with Older People Research Project. Below is the list of the 11 ideas generated across the group:

  • Named social worker for work with people aged 65 and over  
  • Reallocating some of Social Workers current workload to other teams (e.g. Finance and Brokerage) 
  • Using technology to reduce administration and/or improve work allocation and case management 
  • Improving an existing process or a part of an existing process 
  • Re-establishing the Specialist Practitioner role within Social Work teams to improve practice development 
  • Improved support for carers during acute episodes and in general
  • Enhancing Social Work supervision to develop more analytical thinking 
  • Relocating Adult Social Work teams back into community hubs 
  • Linking Carer needs assessment with older person’s needs assessment 
  • Devolved budgets for Social Work teams to aid transparency and foster creativity in options for meeting needs  
  • Developing a shared understanding and standard for strengths-based, proportionate assessment

In January 2025, the Senior Strategic Improvement Coach asked all members of the Steering Group to complete an online survey and vote for the three ideas most important to them. The list above is organised in rank order of the most popular to the least popular ideas.  In February 2025, the Academic Principal Investigator, Social Work with Older People project shared an update on the research project and the Walsall Council/IMPACT project at a Making Research Count webinar. The audience, predominantly social workers, were invited to vote on the same list of 11 ideas. Their top three were: 

  • Linking Carer needs assessment with older person’s needs assessment 
  • Named social worker for work with people aged 65 and over
  • Reallocating some of Social Workers current workload to other teams AND using technology to reduce administration and/or improve work allocation and case management 

In early March 2025, the Steering Group met in person for a Theory of Change workshop. In the workshop, 14 participants sat in three groups and worked through different activities informed by an Appreciative Inquiry approach. This approach primarily focuses on the strengths of an area, team and/or service and seeks to build on those strengths to make improvements. There are five steps within the Appreciative Inquiry approach:

  • Discover – What are our strengths/opportunities? 
  • Define – What are we trying to change? 
  • Dream – What will success look like, feel like, sound like? 
  • Design – Solution design 
  • Deliver – Solution implementation

Focusing on the first three steps of the Appreciative Inquiry approach, the aim of the workshop was to leave with clarity on: 

  • The issue(s) we plan to improve through this project 
  • The improvements we want to make 
  • The strengths/assets available to us  
  • The outcomes we want to achieve 

Based on the outcomes of the two prioritisation activities, the Steering Group agreed to initially focus on four priorities in the workshop: 

  1. Linking Carer needs assessment with older person’s needs assessment 
  1. Named social worker for work with older people  
  1. Using technology to reduce administration and/or improve work allocation and case management 
  1. Reallocating some of Social Workers current workload to other teams  

When the three groups were asked to select two priorities to focus on, one group discussed named social worker for work with older people, two groups discussed the use of technology to support social work, and all three groups discussed linking carer’s needs assessment and older person’s needs assessment. The topic ‘Reallocating some of Social Workers current workload to other teams’ was not selected by any table and so organically fell out of scope of the project. 

The notes from the discussions at the Theory of Change Workshop were documented and interpreted by the Strategic Improvement Coach who provided proposals on the activities that project could complete to meet the improvement objectives. The Steering Group met in April 2024 to discuss those interpretations and decide whether the suggested proposals seemed achievable. A collective decision was made to establish an 65+ co-production group and design and deliver workforce development initiatives to support improvements in three key areas: 

  • Adopting a named social worker approach for people over 65 with complex needs 
  • Linking carer’s needs assessments with people over 65’s needs assessment 
  • Improving processes, systems and communication

Project Review and Next Steps

As planned, between April – August 2025, the Co-Production and Workforce Development leads completed a significant amount of work to lay the foundations to support Walsall’s Localities and Intermediate Care Service to effectively adopt new ways of working.

Lisa-Kay Waite, Co-Production Lead, Walsall Council and Keymn Whervin, Co-Production and Lived Experience Associate, West Midlands ADASS led the Co-Production workstream. They contacted and visited care and support providers and voluntary organisations across Walsall to build relationships, share details of this and other co-production projects happening across Walsall Adult Social Care, and encourage reflections, contributions and participation. The Workforce Development workstream was led by Seanna Lassetter, Principal Social Worker, Walsall Council, and Gerry Nosowska, Director, Effective Practice Ltd. They both wanted to ensure that the staff support provided was co-designed and co-delivered with staff and experts by experience. Gerry reviewed Walsall Adult Social Care’s workforce development strategy and spoke with staff from the team to shape a draft training, communications and evaluation implementation plan.  

The Strategic Improvement Coach saw the opportunity to connect both workstreams. She asked Gerry to share questions for Walsall residents who draw on care and support and carers to inform the workforce development design. Those questions were built into an online and paper-based survey which Keymn and Lisa-Kay shared with the organisations they had contacted. They also visited community centres to ask questions to carers and people who draw on care and support in person. We received 20 responses to the questionnaire which were shared with Gerry to shape the approach and content of the workforce development initiatives.  

Alongside this work, Tina James, Head of Service for Localities and Pathway to Independence and Eve Morris, Group Manager – Localities considered the practical implications of implementing a new way of working across four locality teams. In addition to contributing to the workforce development design, they have drawn on learning from historic changes in allocation and more recent learning from other Walsall Social Care teams who have successfully implemented a named social worker approach. They have used this evidence to formulate a phased implementation plan beginning with two localities teams, monitoring and evaluating impact, and using that information to make decisions on further roll out.  

The final Steering Group meeting with IMPACT involvement took place in August 2025. The invitation to the Steering Group was extended to colleagues from Walsall Together and NHS Primary Care Networks. In the session, they worked with social care colleagues and experts by experience to develop relationships, share their thoughts on the work completed to date and highlight further considerations to support an integrated neighbourhood-focused implementation of this adult social care-led project. The discussions included feedback on first drafts of the Workforce Development plan and the Co-Production Case Study which helped to further develop both documents.

  • Walsall Council have allocated project management resource to support the implementation phase of the project.  
  • The Steering Group will continue to meet monthly in person with dates currently agreed from September 2025 until March 2026.  
  • Briefing and training sessions for adult social care staff are scheduled for September 2025 October 2025 and January 2026 to support phase 1 and 2 of implementing the new ways of working.  
  • The IMPACT Evidence and Evaluation team are supporting the Principal Social Worker and Head of Service in developing and implementing effective evaluation tools to monitor the impact of the new approaches.  
  • Plans are being developed to share the learning from this project locally and further afield.    

Meet Our Demonstrator: Lorraine Mighty

Lorraine Mighty

I have over 20-years’ experience of people and programme management, learning facilitation and organisational development in the private and education sector.

I joined IMPACT because of the shared alignment between my values and approaches to work and those of the Centre and wider team. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to transfer my skills into supporting improvements in social care services and foster IMPACT’s coproduction and evidence-informed approaches.