Age Concern Brighton Hove & Portslade

Older people and well-being project
Research Bulletin no 2 – January 2010

Age Concern Brighton, Hove and Portslade and the University of Brighton are half way through an innovative research project about older people and well-being. It has been developed with a research team of older people and places older people’s experiences at the centre. During the last 9 months we have been looking at different perspectives on well-being through interviews and focus groups with practitioners and different groups of older people in Brighton and Hove. The focus has been:

What does well-being mean to older people?
What factors contribute to well-being?
What can Age Concern contribute to older people’s well- being?
How can Age Concern work with other agencies in the city to enhance older people’s well-being?

The research partnership builds on our previous joint work - Cheers!? A project about older people and alcohol -to develop the model of undertaking research with multiple stakeholders and enhance Age Concern’s pro-active role in building the evidence base of local older people’s needs. By doing this we aim to develop critical perspectives on policy and practice in relation to the personalisation agenda and add ‘intelligence’ to local responses to the transformation of care services around self-directed care. We anticipate that a key output will be a framework for understanding and developing older people’s well-being that could be applied in a number of practice contexts and inform the development of services for older people within both the voluntary and the statutory sector and promote knowledge exchange between the two.

Increasingly government policy (Putting People First, Shaping the Future of Care Together) recognises the role of prevention and well-being in provision of services for older people. Our research engages with this policy agenda and we will be well-positioned to contribute to current debate about future provision and policy direction.

Older people at the centre…
One of the unique things about our partnership has been the way we have been able to involve older people directly in the research. Or research team now includes ten Age Concern volunteers (aged between 60 - 87) who have been working with us to develop the research design. Team members come from a variety of former professional backgrounds and bring an enormous amount of experience and knowledge to the project. The team has undertaken research training on all aspects of research and some of the members have conducted individual interviews and focus groups over the last few months to gain the perspectives and experiences of older people. These have included people aged 65 who use Age Concern services and we are now beginning to involve older people who are not connected to Age Concern. We know from our previous experience that working in this way and involving older people actively in the research process greatly enhances our capacity to produce knowledge that reflects the experiences of older people in a meaningful way.

The four phases of the project
Phase 1 Age Concern perspectives
The first phase of our research, which focused on Age Concern perspectives, has been completed and some interesting themes have emerged in relation to the ways in which Age Concern works to promote older people’s well-being. These relate to person-centred practice; time; relationships and personal motivations.

Phase 2 Age Concern service-users’ perspectives
Interviews and focus groups have been carried out with older people who use Age Concern services. These have been conducted by the co-researchers using a topic guide designed by the team which invites participants to reflect on what contributes to their well-being . This approach aims to generate contextualised and holistic understandings of the subjective nature of well-being, rather than asking people to respond to a set of pre-defined questions. The team has started working on analysing the themes that have emerged from the interviews.

Phase 3 Perspectives of older people in Brighton and Hove
Phase 3 builds on the second phase and expands the focus to people over 65 living in Brighton and Hove. We aim to capture the diversity of experiences within our community in relation to age, gender, cultural background, sexuality and geographical location. Interviews and focus groups will be carried out over the next 3 – 4 months.

Phase 4 – Perspectives of practitioners and other service providers
The last phase of the research will focus on the perspectives of practitioners and other providers of services for older people in health, social care and housing. This will build on the picture we have gained through the earlier phases and contribute to contribute to local knowledge of the issues that are important for older people’s well-being and produce research that is relevant and useful to those working with and providing services for older people.

Getting involved …
During the next phases of the research we would like to engage local stakeholders and practitioners from social care, health, and housing within the statutory, private and voluntary sectors. The aim is to identify what facilitates and enhances good practice with a view to creating routes for a ‘skills and knowledge exchange’ between those working in different sectors. In our earlier Cheers project, we learnt the value of working with stakeholders, as representatives from the PCT, DAAT and the City Council in the areas of housing; community development adult social care and health promotion involved in the project ensured that the research was accessible and relevant to a wide range of practitioners and policy makers. If you are working with, or providing services to, older people and would like to find out more about contributing to the project please get in touch.

Sharing what we learn from the research

As part of the development of our previous and current research we have presented our work at a number of conferences and events and are working on a number of publications. The current policy focus of giving older people more ‘voice’ in health and care services (for example the recent government document Empowering Engagement) has generated a lot of interest in our work from practitioners who are increasingly required to involve older people in the services they deliver. The feedback we have received indicates that the model of participation we are developing is a useful example of how involving older people works ‘in practice’ which could be used in other contexts. In addition to the practice–based outcomes the research is already making a contribution to teaching and learning within the university. We have worked together to deliver lectures to the Masters and undergraduate students and seminar presentations to health and social care practitioners.

If you would like to find out more about the research, or have ideas about how to involve people or groups you work with, please contact Lizzie Ward, University of Brighton 01273 643903 e.ward@brighton.ac.uk or Beatrice Gahagan, Age Concern Brighton, Hove & Portslade 01273 720603 Beatrice.Gahagan@ageconcern-bhp.org.uk

Research Bulletin no 1

Age Concern Brighton, Hove and Portslade and the University of Brighton are working together on a new research project about older people and well-being. The research will be developed over the next two years and like our earlier joint project on older people and alcohol this project will place older people’s experiences at the centre of the research. We want to build on the relationships we developed through working together by producing research which is relevant and useful to those who provide services for older people and for older people themselves.

‘Well-being’ is the overarching theme of our new research project, and we will be looking at different perspectives on well-being through interviews and focus groups with different groups of older people in Brighton and Hove. We are interested in finding out:

What well-being means to older people?
What factors contribute to well-being?
What can Age Concern contribute to older people’s well- being?
How can Age Concern work with other agencies in the city to enhance older people’s well-being?

So far …

We have a new and expanded team of eleven older co-researchers who have been recruited through Age Concern’s volunteer base. Team members come from a variety of former professional backgrounds and bring an enormous amount of experience and knowledge to the project. We are currently undergoing a process of research training together and as a team developing the detailed design of the research. We know from our previous experience that working in this way and involving older people actively in the research process greatly enhances our capacity to produce knowledge that reflects the experiences of older people in a meaningful way. The co-researchers will be undertaking the interviews and focus groups and we will shortly be looking to recruit older people across the city to take part in these.

We have already conducted interviews with Age Concern staff and volunteers to capture their views and experiences and there are some interesting themes emerging. We would like to extend the research to capture the views of a range of practitioners working with older people in different settings in the statutory sector, with a view to creating routes for a skills and ‘knowledge exchange’ between those working in different sectors. This will include identifying what facilitates and enhances good/person-centred practice and what gets in the way. We hope to contribute to local knowledge of the issues that are important for older people’s well-being and produce research that is relevant and useful to those working with and providing services for older people.