Project Background
Walsall Council want to work with people with lived experience and with IMPACT to find ways to deliver better outcomes for older people and communities supported by Walsall’s Locality Teams and Intermediate Care Service.
This Demonstrator draws 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 (see https://swopresearch.wordpress.com/swop-resources/).
Alongside the insights from that project, this Demonstrator is also informed by an evidence review created when the project started in September 2024. It also continues to draw on perspectives from people with lived experience, social care professionals, health, commissioning and voluntary, charity, faith and social enterprise sources to ensure decisions are evidence-informed.
What improvements does the project hope to make?
IMPACT is supporting 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 hopes to make improvements in the:
Who is involved in the project?
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:
The Steering Group has two key purposes:
- To decide what the project will do (and also be clear on what it will not do)
- 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:
How has the project gathered and prioritised improvement ideas?
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:
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 older people
- Reallocating some of Social Workers current workload to other teams AND using technology to reduce administration and/or improve work allocation and case management
How have decisions been made on what activities the project will do?
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:
Focusing on the first three steps of the Appreciative Inquiry approach, the aim of the workshop was to leave with clarity on:
Based on the outcomes of the two prioritisation activities, the Steering Group agreed to initially focus on four priorities in the workshop:
- Linking Carer needs assessment with older person’s needs assessment
- Named social worker for work with older people
- Using technology to reduce administration and/or improve work allocation and case management
- 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 older people coproduction group and design and deliver workforce development initiatives to support improvements in three key areas:
Next steps
From April – August 2025, IMPACT will support Walsall Council in establishing the coproduction and workforce development initiatives which will underpin the development of small-scale pilot projects in the three key improvement priorities.
Walsall Council have identified leads for each project workstream. The Strategic Improvement Coach will work with the leads to establish project delivery teams and a develop delivery plan that acknowledges the interdependencies between each workstream.
If you are an older person or a carer of an older person living in Walsall and would like to get involved in this project, please contact Lorraine Mighty on [email protected] or text/call 07483 196067.
Project staff
Lorraine Mighty
SENIOR STRATEGIC IMPROVEMENT COACH
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.
Social work with older people