research topics for social care

199+ Social Work Research Topics [Updated 2024]

In the vast and dynamic field of social work, research plays a pivotal role in shaping interventions, policies, and practices. Social work research is not just an academic pursuit but a powerful tool for effecting positive change in communities. As aspiring researchers delve into this realm, the journey begins with a crucial decision – selecting the right social work research topic.

In this blog, we will explore the significance of choosing the right social work research topics, provide insights into the selection process, highlight popular research areas, discuss emerging trends, offer tips for conducting research, and share valuable resources for social work researchers.

Significance of Choosing the Right Social Work Research Topics

Table of Contents

Impact on Research Quality

The choice of a research topic significantly influences the quality and relevance of the research conducted. A well-chosen topic enhances the researcher’s ability to contribute meaningfully to the existing body of knowledge in social work.

Alignment with Personal Interests and Goals

Selecting a topic aligned with personal interests and career goals fosters a sense of passion and commitment. This alignment not only sustains the researcher’s enthusiasm throughout the process but also increases the likelihood of producing impactful research.

Contribution to the Field of Social Work

The right research topic has the potential to contribute to the broader field of social work by addressing pressing issues, proposing innovative solutions, and advancing our understanding of complex social dynamics.

How to Select Social Work Research Topics?

• Understanding the Scope of Social Work: Social work is a multifaceted discipline that encompasses various domains such as mental health, child welfare, community development, and more. Prospective researchers should explore the diverse scopes within social work to identify areas that resonate with their interests and expertise.
• Identifying Personal Interests and Passion: Passion fuels research endeavors. Researchers should reflect on their personal experiences, values, and interests to identify areas within social work that evoke a strong sense of commitment.
• Considering Relevance to Current Social Issues: Social work research gains significance when it addresses current societal challenges. Researchers should evaluate potential topics based on their relevance to contemporary issues, ensuring that the findings can contribute meaningfully to ongoing dialogues and efforts for social change.

199+ Social Work Research Topics: Category-Wise

Mental health and social work.

• The impact of community support on mental health outcomes.
• Examining the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions in social work.
• Exploring stigma surrounding mental health in diverse populations.
• Integrating technology in mental health counseling: Challenges and opportunities.
• The role of social work in preventing suicide and self-harm.

Diversity and Inclusion in Social Work

• LGBTQ+ inclusivity in social work practice.
• Addressing microaggressions and bias in social work interactions.
• Promoting cultural competence in social work education.
• Exploring challenges faced by immigrants and refugees in accessing social services.
• Intersectionality in social work: Understanding and addressing multiple identities.

Social Work and Community Development

• Evaluating the impact of community gardens on neighborhood well-being.
• The role of social workers in disaster response and recovery.
• Strategies for combating homelessness and housing insecurity.
• Assessing the effectiveness of community-based participatory research in social work.
• Social work’s contribution to sustainable community development.

Social Work and Child Welfare

• Investigating the long-term outcomes of children in foster care.
• The impact of parental substance abuse on child welfare.
• Exploring cultural competence in child welfare services.
• Innovative approaches to supporting kinship care families.
• Assessing the effectiveness of early intervention programs for at-risk children.

Global Perspectives in Social Work Research

• Cross-cultural perspectives on social work ethics.
• Human rights and social work: An international comparison.
• The role of social work in addressing global health disparities.
• Social work responses to forced migration and refugee crises.
• Comparative analysis of social work systems in different countries.

Technology and Social Work

• Ethical considerations in the use of artificial intelligence in social work.
• Online therapy and its implications for the future of social work.
• Integrating telehealth in social work practice: Challenges and benefits.
• Cyberbullying and the role of social workers in prevention and intervention.
• The impact of social media on social work advocacy.

Policy and Advocacy in Social Work

• Analyzing the impact of welfare reform on vulnerable populations.
• Social work advocacy for criminal justice reform.
• The role of social workers in shaping healthcare policies.
• Addressing disparities in access to education through social work policy.
• Environmental justice and the role of social work in sustainability.

Substance Abuse and Addiction in Social Work

• Harm reduction strategies in social work practice.
• Supporting families affected by substance abuse: A social work perspective.
• Exploring the intersection of trauma and addiction in social work.
• Assessing the effectiveness of drug prevention programs in schools.
• The role of social workers in opioid addiction treatment.

Gerontology and Aging in Social Work

• Aging in place: Examining the role of social work in supporting seniors at home.
• Social isolation and mental health in the elderly population.
• Addressing elder abuse: Strategies for prevention and intervention.
• Palliative care and the role of social workers in end-of-life care.
• The impact of dementia on families and the role of social work support.

Education and Social Work

• The role of school social workers in addressing student mental health.
• Inclusive education: Social work interventions for students with disabilities.
• Bullying prevention programs in schools: A social work perspective.
• Examining the impact of teacher-student relationships on academic outcomes.
• Social work support for students experiencing homelessness.

Human Trafficking and Exploitation

• Human trafficking prevention and intervention strategies in social work.
• The role of social workers in supporting survivors of human trafficking.
• Addressing labor exploitation through social work advocacy.
• Intersectionality and human trafficking: A comprehensive approach.
• Assessing the effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies and programs.

Family Dynamics and Social Work

• Impact of divorce and separation on children: Social work interventions.
• Foster care reunification: Challenges and success factors.
• LGBTQ+ parenting and the role of social work in family support.
• Domestic violence prevention programs: A social work perspective.
• Blended families: Navigating challenges and fostering resilience.

Health and Healthcare Disparities

• Social determinants of health and their impact on vulnerable populations.
• Access to healthcare for underserved communities: A social work perspective.
• The role of social workers in supporting individuals with chronic illnesses.
• Reducing health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities through social work interventions.
• Palliative care and the psychosocial aspects of terminal illness.

Human Rights and Social Work

• Social work advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights.
• Promoting gender equality through social work initiatives.
• Indigenous rights and the role of social workers in reconciliation.
• Advocacy for the rights of people with disabilities: A social work perspective.
• Social work responses to human rights violations and social justice issues.

Disability and Inclusion

• Social work interventions for children with developmental disabilities.
• The impact of inclusive employment programs on individuals with disabilities.
• Accessibility and social work advocacy for people with physical disabilities.
• Autism spectrum disorder: Social work support for individuals and families.
• Inclusive recreation programs: Enhancing the lives of people with disabilities.

Veterans and Military Social Work

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the role of social workers in veteran support.
• Social work interventions for military families experiencing deployment stress.
• Transitioning from military to civilian life: Challenges and opportunities.
• The impact of substance abuse on veterans and social work prevention strategies.
• Access to mental health services for veterans: A social work perspective.

Community Mental Health Programs

• Evaluating the effectiveness of community mental health clinics.
• Peer support programs in community mental health: A social work approach.
• Social work interventions for reducing stigma around mental illness in communities.
• Integrating mental health into primary care settings through collaborative care approaches.
• Social workers’ roles in school-based mental health initiatives.

Immigration and Social Work

• Social work responds to populations of immigrants and refugees’ mental health issues.
• The effect of immigration laws on social service accessibility.
• Community integration and social work support for immigrants.
• Advocacy for immigrant rights: A social work perspective.
• Family reunification and the role of social workers in immigration processes.

Social Work in Rural Communities

• Access to healthcare in rural communities: Social work interventions.
• Substance abuse prevention in rural settings: Challenges and solutions.
• Community development strategies for promoting rural well-being.
• Addressing mental health disparities in rural populations: A social work approach.
• Social work support for families facing economic challenges in rural areas.

Trauma-Informed Social Work Practice

• Integrating trauma-informed care into social work practice.
• Addressing childhood trauma through school-based interventions.
• Trauma-focused therapies and their application in social work.
• Vicarious trauma and self-care strategies for social workers.
• The role of social workers in supporting survivors of sexual assault.

Social Work in Schools

• School-based bullying prevention programs: A social work perspective.
• Social work interventions for students with learning disabilities.
• The impact of school social workers on academic success.
• Mental health support for at-risk youth in school settings.
• The role of social workers in addressing the school-to-prison pipeline.

Criminal Justice and Social Work

• Reentry programs for formerly incarcerated individuals: A social work approach.
• Juvenile justice and the role of social workers in rehabilitation.
• Addressing racial disparities in the criminal justice system: A social work perspective.
• The impact of incarceration on families and social work support.

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)

• Principles and applications of community-based participatory research in social work.
• Engaging communities in the research process: A CBPR approach.
• Evaluating the outcomes of community-based interventions using CBPR.
• Challenges and opportunities in implementing CBPR in diverse settings.
• Empowering communities through CBPR: Case studies and best practices.

Social Work and Environmental Justice

• Climate change and its impact on vulnerable populations: A social work perspective.
• Environmental justice and community organizing: Social work interventions.
• Sustainable community development and the role of social workers.
• Access to clean water and sanitation: A social work advocacy approach.
• Indigenous perspectives on environmental justice: A social work lens.

Human Services Administration

• Leadership styles in human services administration: A social work perspective.
• The role of technology in improving human services delivery.
• Strategies for effective human services program evaluation.
• Addressing burnout and promoting self-care in human services organizations.
• Social work ethics and decision-making in human services administration.

Social Work and Artificial Intelligence

• Applications of AI in social work practice: Opportunities and challenges.
• The role of chatbots in mental health support: A social work perspective.
• Bias and fairness in algorithmic decision-making in social work.
• Human-AI collaboration in social work: Enhancing service delivery.

Crisis Intervention and Social Work

• Social work responses to natural disasters: Lessons learned and best practices.
• Crisis intervention strategies for individuals experiencing acute trauma.
• The role of social workers in emergency shelters and disaster recovery.
• Trauma-informed care in crisis intervention: A social work approach.
• Collaborative approaches to crisis intervention in community settings.

Social Work in the LGBTQ+ Community

• LGBTQ+ youth homelessness: Social work interventions and prevention.
• Supporting transgender and non-binary individuals in social work practice.
• Mental health disparities in the LGBTQ+ community: A social work perspective.
• LGBTQ+ inclusive policies in social service organizations.
• Social work advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights and equal access to services.

Social Work and Aging

• Aging in place: Social work interventions for promoting independence.
• Social work support for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and their families.
• End-of-life decision-making and the role of social workers.
• Social isolation among older adults: Strategies for prevention and intervention.
• Exploring innovative housing models for aging populations.

Faith-Based Social Work

• The intersection of faith and social work: Ethical considerations.
• Faith-based organizations in community development: A social work perspective.
• Pastoral care and counseling: Social work support in religious communities.
• Addressing religious discrimination in social work practice.
• Interfaith dialogue and its role in fostering social cohesion: A social work approach.

Social Work in Substance Use Prevention

• Social work interventions for preventing substance use among adolescents.
• The impact of early childhood experiences on later substance use: A social work perspective.
• Prevention programs targeting high-risk populations: A social work approach.
• Social work support for families affected by parental substance use.
• Community-based strategies for preventing opioid misuse: A social work lens.

Global Mental Health and Social Work

• Cultural considerations in global mental health: A social work approach.
• Collaborative approaches to addressing mental health stigma globally.
• The role of social workers in disaster mental health response internationally.
• Integrating traditional healing practices into global mental health interventions.
• Comparative analysis of mental health policies and services worldwide.

Social Work and Human-Animal Interaction

• Animal-assisted therapy in social work practice: Applications and benefits.
• The role of therapy animals in reducing stress and promoting well-being.
• Animal cruelty prevention and the role of social workers.
• The impact of pet ownership on mental health: A social work perspective.
• Ethical considerations in incorporating animals into social work interventions.

Refugee Mental Health and Social Work

• Trauma-informed approaches in working with refugee populations.
• Social work support for refugee children in educational settings.
• Addressing mental health disparities among refugee communities.
• Cultural competence in providing mental health services to refugees.
• Resettlement challenges and social work interventions for refugees.

Community Resilience and Social Work

• Building community resilience in the face of adversity: A social work perspective.
• Social work interventions for promoting resilience in vulnerable populations.
• Resilience-based mental health programs in schools: A social work approach.
• The role of social workers in disaster resilience planning.
• Collective trauma and community healing: A social work lens.

Technology and Social Work Ethics

• Ethical considerations in the use of social media in social work practice.
• Privacy and confidentiality in the age of digital record-keeping.
• Ensuring equity in access to technology-based interventions: A social work approach.
• Social work responses to cyberbullying: Prevention and intervention strategies.
• Ethical guidelines for the use of virtual reality in social work practice.

Social Work in Sports

• Sports-based youth development programs: A social work perspective.
• The role of social workers in promoting mental health in athletes.
• Addressing substance use and performance-enhancing drugs in sports: A social work lens.
• Inclusive sports programs for individuals with disabilities: A social work approach.
• Social work interventions for preventing and addressing sports-related violence.

Social Work in the Arts

• Arts-based interventions in social work practice: Applications and outcomes.
• The role of creative expression in trauma recovery: A social work perspective.
• Using theater and performance arts in social work education and therapy.
• Arts programs for at-risk youth: A social work approach.
• The impact of the arts on community well-being: A social work lens.

Social Work and Foster Care Adoption

• Social work interventions for successful foster care reunification.
• Addressing the unique needs of LGBTQ+ youth in foster care.
• The impact of foster care placement on child development: A social work perspective.
• Post-adoption support services: A social work approach.
• Cultural competence in transracial and transcultural foster care and adoption.

Social Work in the Gig Economy

• The Role of Social Work in Addressing Mental Health Challenges in the Gig Economy
• Exploring Social Work Strategies for Supporting Gig Workers’ Financial Stability
• Gig Economy and Social Work Advocacy: Ensuring Fair Labor Practices
• Navigating Occupational Hazards: Social Work Interventions in Gig Work Environments
• Social Work’s Contribution to Promoting Work-Life Balance in the Gig Economy

Emerging Trends in Social Work Research

• The Impact of Technology on Social Work Practice: Examine how technology is influencing social work practices and service delivery, considering both advantages and ethical considerations.
• Ethical Considerations in the Use of Technology in Social Work Research: Discuss the ethical challenges associated with the integration of technology in social work research and propose guidelines for responsible use.
• Cross-Cultural Studies in Social Work: Explore the significance of cross-cultural studies in social work research, promoting a deeper understanding of diverse cultural contexts.
• Addressing Global Social Issues through Research: Investigate how social work research can contribute to addressing global social challenges, such as poverty, migration, and climate change.

Tips for Conducting Social Work Research

Developing a Research Question

Craft a research question for social work research topics that is clear, concise, and aligns with the chosen social work research topic. The question should guide the research process and contribute meaningfully to the existing literature.

Choosing Appropriate Research Methods

Select research methods that align with the nature of the research question and the goals of the study. Consider whether qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods approaches are most suitable for addressing the research objectives.

Ethical Considerations in Social Work Research

Prioritize ethical considerations throughout the research process. Ensure informed consent, confidentiality, and respect for the dignity and rights of research participants.

Resources for Social Work Researchers

Journals and Publications

Explore reputable social work journals and publications to stay updated on the latest research, methodologies, and findings. Examples include the “Journal of Social Work” and the “British Journal of Social Work.”

Professional Organizations

Joining professional organizations such as the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) provides access to valuable resources, networking opportunities, and conferences that enhance a researcher’s knowledge and skills.

Online Databases and Research Tools

Utilize online databases like PubMed , Social Work Abstracts, and Google Scholar to access a wide range of social work research articles. Additionally, familiarize yourself with research tools and software that can streamline the research process.

In conclusion, the journey of selecting the social work research topics is a crucial step that requires thoughtful consideration and reflection. The chosen topic should align with personal interests, address current social issues, and contribute meaningfully to the field of social work. 

As researchers embark on this journey, they have the opportunity to explore diverse areas, from mental health and child welfare to emerging trends in technology and global perspectives. 

By following ethical guidelines, employing appropriate research methods, and leveraging valuable resources, social work researchers can make significant contributions to improving the well-being of individuals and communities.

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National Academy of Medicine; Simpson L, Siddiqi S, Rosengren K, et al., editors. The Future of Health Services Research: Advancing Health Systems Research and Practice in the United States. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2018.

The Future of Health Services Research: Advancing Health Systems Research and Practice in the United States.

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5 BRIDGING HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES TO IMPROVE CARE ACCESS

A long-time priority of health services research has been a focus on issues affecting access to care, including community factors, the availability of social services, and the social determinants of health. Social determinants of health have been defined by Healthy People 2020 as “conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.” These issues, among others, result in a rich network of interlinked issues for health services researchers.

• UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH

The social determinants of health are ubiquitous and have a significant impact on health outcomes, said Sandro Galea, dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. “You can't avoid thinking about ubiquitous determinants if you want to get insight that informs the kind of questions that health services research is trying to get at.”

Health systems are starting to realize the power of this observation. For example, the Boston Medical Center is investing $6.5 million in affordable housing to enhance health in the community, improve patient outcomes, and reduce medical costs. On its website, the CDC has called attention to several such factors that have a direct and measurable effect on health:

• With rehabilitating housing, 62 percent of adults have excellent health versus 33 percent without such housing.
• In a city of a million residents, a 40 percent expansion in transit development has an annual health benefit of $216 million.
• Early childhood education has a benefit-to-cost ratio of 5 to 1 with a reduction in crime rates, child maltreatment, teen pregnancy, and academic problems.
• Each time the Earned Income Tax Credit increases by 10 percent, infant mortality drops by 23.2 per 100,000 population.

Galea is the coauthor, with Katherine Keyes, of the book Population Health Science , from which he drew two conclusions that are directly relevant for health services research ( Keyes and Galea, 2016 ). The first is that the magnitude of an effect of exposure on disease is dependent on the prevalence of the factors that interact with that exposure. For example, three studies might look at the effects of an intervention on hypertension, with one finding no effect and the other two finding effects of different sizes. One interpretation is that two of the studies were wrong, but that is “not necessarily the case,” said Galea. Rather, the intervention may need to happen along with exposure to other conditions to have an effect. If the intervention and a social condition are both necessary but insufficient causes of an outcome, then the outcome will occur only when both are present. If all, none, or some members of a population are exposed to the social condition, outcomes will vary accordingly when they are exposed to the intervention. The challenge with ubiquitous conditions is that their influence cannot be separated out because they “affect everybody, all of us, all the time,” said Galea. Proper inferences in health services research, therefore, need to take these ubiquitous forces into account.

The second principle he cited is that small changes in ubiquitous causes may result in more substantial changes in the health of populations than larger changes in rarer causes. Galea cited the metaphor of goldfish in a fishbowl that are given plenty of food but die because their water is never changed. Another example is early research on babies whose mothers used crack cocaine that found an association between crack cocaine use and developmental delay. However, long-term studies found that the overriding predictor of developmental delay was exposure to extreme poverty and lack of environmental stimulation. “We missed the presence of the ubiquitous factor.”

Galea drew three implications from these observations. First, “you simply can't forget ubiquitous causes.” Second, researchers need to focus on what matters most. Third, health is not a dichotomous outcome and needs to be considered more broadly as a continuous outcome. “We hinge our inference on stories that are simpler than the reality,” he concluded. All research endeavors must therefore focus on the systemic context of issues being studied.

• MOVING RESEARCH INTO COMMUNITIES

Building on the themes from Galea's presentation, Jack Westfall, medical director of whole-person care at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, observed that most of the people in the community are not getting health care in the places where health services researchers get much of their data. In a classic article on the ecology of medical care, White et al. (1961) displayed graphically that of 1,000 people in a community, 750 experience illness or injury in a given month, 250 seek primary care, 10 are hospitalized, and 1 is hospitalized in an academic health center ( Figure 5-1 ). This assessment was repeated in 2000 and in 2016 ( Green et al. 2001 ; Johansen et al. 2016 ) with similar conclusions.

FIGURE 5–1 |

“Kerr White” boxes describe the number of people, from each 1,000 in a community, who experience an illness or injury in a month, receive ambulatory care, are hospitalized, and are hospitalized in an academic medical center. SOURCE: White (more...)

Not much is known, Westfall pointed out, about the interface between the 10 people who are hospitalized and the 250 people who are seen in an ambulatory setting, or between the people seen in the ambulatory setting and the 500 who experience illness or injury during that month but do not seek care, or between the 750 who experience an illness or injury and the 250 who remain well in a given month.

Innovation moves into the community through the types of research along stages of a translational continuum represented as T1 through T4 in Figure 5-2 , connoting the progress from basic research to the implementation of research in the community. T1 and T2 research occurs mostly at academic institutions. Laboratory discoveries are translated into human pathophysiology. New pills, procedures, and devices are translated into treatments and disease-modifying management programs. But new discoveries also must be translated into clinical practice in real-world settings, where patients and communities can provide the context for new discoveries and lead to locally relevant and meaningful programs and language. T3 and T4 research moves findings from academic institutions into the world of integrated primary care and population health, where data to ask and answer questions about translating discovery in a few to the many begin to accrue. These different kinds of research line up with the boxes in the ecology of medical care, Westfall observed. Much of the early research is done in the institution, while much of the practice-based and community research is done in the larger boxes.

FIGURE 5–2 |

Translational research can move results derived from hospitalized patients into the community. SOURCE: Adapted from White et al. 1961

These observations are not new, Westfall pointed out. In 1967, Marion Folsom published the book Health is a Community Affair , which made the point that education, food security, safe housing, legal services, and other factors all combine to impact individual and community health ( Folsom, 1967 ; Folsom Group, 2012 ). From this perspective, health care problems occur in the community, not in the smaller boxes of the ecology of health care ( Figure 5-2 ). They encompass public health, community services, and primary care. The judicial system, food deserts, education levels, safe housing, and human services “all conspire to impact health care and health care utilization.”

Health services research must ensure that it is assessing the ultimate impact of forces on system-wide performance and health outcomes, Westfall observed. It can work at the level of integrated primary care, at the community level, or with people who are experiencing the social determinants of health but are not yet suffering consequences to their health. Traditional academic research increases understanding of what happens when prevention does not occur or illness is not treated. Health services research can define the parameters of prevention, measure the impact and develop interventions for the disintegrated social determinants of health, and ask and answer questions that matter to more people more of the time. “However, we've seen a disproportionate share of health services research time and resources spent on the small boxes in the lower right-hand corner,” said Westfall, where hospital claims data and electronic health record data tend to be available. “Health services research has gravitated to where the data are.” A primary challenge for the field is shaping the capacity to account for and assess system factors in play.

Focusing on the ubiquitous determinants of health in social and community settings can link the small boxes with the much larger boxes. It can also help meet needs in the clinic, community, and broader population. In the exam room, providers need discoveries to work for individual patients given their unique biology, family, neighborhood, values, and choices. In an integrated primary care clinic, providers and their staff need discoveries that they can offer safely with high fidelity and quality. At the community level, they need discoveries that patients will seek out and accept, that are available, and that align with the values of the community. At the population level, they need discoveries that are affordable, that make the world a better place, and that balance the needs of the individual, practice, and community.

• EFFECTS OF HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFIT DESIGN

Within the health care system, consumers can be engaged in their care through a variety of mechanisms, including shared decision-making, case management, health navigators, and benefit design. Michael Chernew, Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, discussed the last of these options. It is not the only and may not even be the best way to involve consumers in health care decisions, he said, but it has been the focus of much innovative health services research.

Annual health care deductibles have been rising much faster than inflation or earnings since 2011. Deductibles are designed to improve incentives for health care consumers by reducing excess use of health care and encouraging price shopping. However, there are three problems with this approach. Prices for health care are high, some health care services are overused, and some are underused. Patients do respond to cost sharing ( Brook et al. 2006 ). When they are charged more, they use less care. However, “consumers aren't great shoppers,” Chernew noted. “They cut back on appropriate use and inappropriate use in the exact same amount.” Copays reduce the use of preventive services and beneficial pharmaceuticals (Sui et al. 1986). “It's amazing how little you can charge somebody and have them not take their preventive medicines or use preventive services.” The overall picture, said Chernew, quoting a friend, is that “the United States has Star Wars medicine and Flintstone financing.”

“Nuances” can be a critical influence in benefit design, said Chernew. For example, use of a tiered network design can steer patients away from nonpreferred to preferred hospitals ( Frank et al. 2015 ). Benefit designs can affect whether patients choose high-price or low-price hospitals for knee- or hip-replacement surgery ( Robinson and Brown, 2013 ). The structuring of copayments can increase adherence to medications ( Chernew, 2008 ).

The problem with nuances is that they can be complicated, Chernew admitted. “The challenge for health services research going forward is how nuanced can we be” and to identify innovative nuances that decrease spending without negatively impacting outcomes for patients. For example, straightforward price transparency tools are not associated with lower outpatient spending ( Desai et al. 2016 ); instead, patients tend to do what their doctors say. Better incentive designs have the potential to work, he insisted, so long as consumers are not overwhelmed. “You have to both give them tools but understand that they're not going to use tools and be as rational as you might think they would be.”

• DEALING WITH COMPLEX HEALTH CARE NEEDS

Gerard Anderson, professor of health policy and management and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management, pointed out that one important finding from health services research is that most spending and utilization are by people with complex health care needs, including people with multiple chronic conditions and/or functional limitations. For example, health services research has revealed that people with complex health care needs have much higher readmission rates on average. This finding has led to new initiatives involving clinical and community interventions, though a major challenge is finding and implementing programs that control spending while improving satisfaction and clinical outcomes.

The issues raised by people with complex health care needs run counter to the severe siloing that occurs in health care, Anderson pointed out. For example, most clinical trials exclude people with complex needs, but “they are the ones who are mostly taking the drugs.” Health services research has developed approaches to fill in the missing information but not always successfully. Similarly, most fee-for-service payment systems focus on one problem at a time, though health services research has developed risk adjusters that allow for approaches like capitation. In addition, most quality metrics are disease or procedure specific, and most clinical education programs still teach about the body organ by organ. It is incumbent on health services research to break down these silos—for example, through research on care coordination.

More work is needed on adjusting outcome measures for people with chronic conditions and determining the most significant interventions and settings for people with particular sets of conditions, said Anderson. Reconciling who benefits and who pays in such situations is a critical problem, because in many cases the benefit for which an insurer pays does not occur until much later.

Anderson also took an international perspective on health services research. The United States actually uses fewer medical services than most other industrialized countries. In 2015, it had 19 percent fewer doctors, 20 percent fewer nurses, and 26 percent fewer hospital beds compared to the median country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). However, the price of its health care makes the United States unique. This raises several new questions for health services research. For example, Anderson asked why the private sector is willing to pay 50 percent more than the public sector for the same service. One answer is that providers will spend whatever they are given, which then becomes their cost, he said. Another question is why the United States is willing to pay 50 to 100 percent more for brand name drugs than other industrialized countries. Members of Congress with whom Anderson has talked are “very concerned about this particular issue.” Clearly, a research priority is making more transparent the systemic factors that shape the course of health costs and value.

Relatedly, Anderson mentioned tiered benefits in the context of pharmaceuticals. The greatest challenges for pharmaceuticals are access and adherence. Surveys by the Commonwealth Fund suggest that the US population has the most difficulty purchasing drugs among OECD countries ( Sarnak et al. 2017 ). This finding, too, raises several compelling questions:

• How can tiered benefits be designed for very expensive drugs?
• What are the tradeoffs between who pays and who benefits?
• What can consumers understand about tier, cost, and treatment tradeoffs?

A prominent example involves hepatitis C, now responsible for the most infectious disease deaths in the United States. There are effective treatments for hepatitis C with minimal side effects, yet many people with hepatitis C are not getting care because of costs. Medicare beneficiaries must pay an average of $7,000 out of pocket, and states cannot afford to provide hepatitis C drugs to all prisoners, Medicaid recipients, and the uninsured, Anderson observed.

• SUPPORTIVE AND PROTECTIVE FACTORS

Meeting participants also considered the importance of a better understanding of the protective community factors that keep people out of the health care system, such as patient health behaviors, social supports, and social services. For example, Lucy Savitz, vice president for health research for Kaiser Permanente Northwest Region, said that she helped rebuild the primary care system in Biloxi, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina, which impressed on her the importance of protective factors like strong social support and family cohesion. Later, at Intermountain Healthcare Institute for Healthcare Delivery Research, she observed that even people with fairly serious mental health conditions could be safely cared for in a primary care setting if they had strong social support and family cohesion.

Galea observed that research shows that one of the best ways to mitigate mental illnesses after a disaster is to focus on social support and social services. “Make sure people have houses, people have care for their elderly parents, people can get their kids into school,” he said. “That mitigates the consequences on mental health.” In fact, he thought it an artificial distinction to say that delivering mental health services is a health service while delivering housing is a social service. “Ultimately, they are restoring people to health or improving population health.” Health services researchers are partly responsible for this, he continued, by limiting their scope to medical services and leaving other services to other people.

Westfall connected the issue to the ecology of medical care, pointing out that the 250 people each month who do not experience illness or injury is the same size as the group of people who seek medical care, but it is half the size of the group of people who experience an illness or injury but do not seek care. “Something is going on in that group that's half of the population, but they're not seeking care,” he observed. “What are the factors that are occurring in the community that are protective? . . . What occurs in that box of 500 people who experience illness or injury but who don't seek care? That's a group that health services research could learn a lot from.”

Ann Beal, global leader of patient solutions at Sanofi, noted that factors intrinsic to patients are also important to health care, such as patient health behaviors. “Now that we're in an era when so many of the conditions require significant patient self-management, this will help us to be much more accurate in our ability to understand not only health outcomes but also how patients then navigate the health care system.” She also pointed out that, by focusing on the average, half the people are outside one standard deviation from the mean. Could a more personalized set of analyses enable health services researchers to move from observational analyses to more predictive analyses and ultimately prescriptive analysis? Anderson commented that considerable work is being done on trying to characterize people into categories in such areas as “need for social services” and “adherence to treatments.” The policy challenge is that categorization tends to divide people into categories that get different levels of service.

• Cite this Page National Academy of Medicine; Simpson L, Siddiqi S, Rosengren K, et al., editors. The Future of Health Services Research: Advancing Health Systems Research and Practice in the United States. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2018. 5, BRIDGING HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES TO IMPROVE CARE ACCESS.
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• Published: 06 June 2020

Measuring the benefits of the integration of health and social care: qualitative interviews with professional stakeholders and patient representatives

• Helen Crocker   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-0749 1 ,
• Laura Kelly 1 , 2 ,
• Jenny Harlock 3 ,
• Ray Fitzpatrick 1 &
• Michele Peters 1  

BMC Health Services Research volume  20 , Article number:  515 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Integrated care has the potential to ease the increasing pressures faced by health and social care systems, however, challenges around measuring the benefits for providers, patients, and service users remain. This paper explores stakeholders’ views on the benefits of integrated care and approaches to measuring the integration of health and social care.

Twenty-five semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with professional stakeholders ( n  = 19) and patient representatives ( n  = 6). Interviews focused on the benefits of integrated care and how it should be evaluated. Data was analysed using framework analysis.

Three overarching themes emerged from the data: (1) integrated care and its benefits, with stakeholders defining it primarily from the patient’s perspective; (2) potential measures for assessing the benefits of integration in terms of system effects, patient experiences, and patient outcomes; and (3) broader considerations around the assessment of integrated care, including the use of qualitative methods.

Conclusions

There was consensus among stakeholders that patient experiences and outcomes are the best measures of integration, and that the main measures currently used to assess integration do not directly assess patient benefits. Validated health status measures are readily available, however, a substantial shift in practices is required before their use becomes commonplace.

Peer Review reports

Transforming the delivery of health and social care is needed to address the growing pressures due to funding constraints and increasing complexity of needs for services [ 1 , 2 ]. In an attempt to address these issues, various programmes to integrate health services have been developed internationally [ 3 , 4 ]. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recognises the importance of integrated care and recently developed a ‘ Framework on integrated people-centred health services ’ calling for fundamental change in the funding, management, and delivery of health services [ 5 ]. In England, many initiatives [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ] have attempted to integrate the health and social care systems, with varying success, and most recently Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are intended to cover the whole of England, as set out in the UK National Health Service (NHS) Long-Term Plan [ 10 ].

There are many different definitions and concepts of integrated care [ 11 , 12 ]. A commonly referred to definition was developed by NHS England and National Voices, and takes a person-centred approach, “ I can plan my care with people who work together to understand me and my carer(s), allow me control, and bring together services to achieve the outcomes important to me ” [ 13 ]. While the integration of services can take many forms (e.g. horizontal or vertical), the focus of this paper is the integration of health and social care services. As an example, the Better Care Fund initiative pooled budgets to encourage local health and social care services to work more closely together to deliver ‘better, more joined-up services to older and disabled people, to keep them out of hospital and to avoid long hospital stays’ [ 14 ]. Initiatives funded through this scheme included multi-disciplinary teams, seven-day working, and single points of access.

Integrated care is difficult to achieve, especially in England where health and social care systems have a long standing institutional separation, with distinct funding and accountability arrangements. As such, it is important to be able to effectively evaluate the success of integrated care initiatives, and to achieve this, appropriate measures need to be available. However, questions have been raised about the suitability of existing measures, in particular, their breadth. Where instruments are available, there is a general lack of evidence to support their quality [ 15 ]. Furthermore, additional guidance around which measures and measurement instruments should be used is needed to aid comparisons of the success of strategies [ 16 ].

As integrated care arrangements continue to develop, there is a need to better understand their impact for patients, service users, and service providers. This study aimed to investigate how a diverse range of professional stakeholders and patient representatives viewed current approaches to assessing outcomes of the integration of health and social care. The findings are likely to be of international interest as countries attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of diverse integrated care arrangements and their impacts.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders to explore the value of integrated care, identify aspects for evaluation to determine the success of integrated care, and identify appropriate measures for these aspects. Commonly, integrated care is pursued for patients and service users, without adequately acknowledging the potential contributions that they can make [ 17 ]. In an attempt to overcome this, patient representatives were included as active participants in this research, alongside professional stakeholders.

Recruitment

Professional stakeholders were recruited through publically available information of national and regional NHS and social care representative bodies and stakeholder organisations, existing networks, and referral (i.e. snowballing) from those contacted or recruited using the above methods. Potential participants were selected based on their interest in and knowledge of integrated care services, and of policy/strategy and implementation in relation to integrated care. A purposive sampling strategy was adopted to recruit diverse respondents across the health and care sectors.

Patient representatives were recruited through the Quality and Outcomes of Person-Centred Care Policy Research Unit’s (QORU) Public Involvement and Implementation Group, a strategic group which oversees public involvement in QORU projects and includes members of the public.

Forty stakeholders and members of the Public Involvement and Implementation Group were sent an email invitation and participant information sheet about the study. Stakeholders were sent a reminder email where no response was received. We aimed to conduct 25 interviews across patient representatives, health and social care policy makers, system stakeholders and professionals. It was anticipated that this sample size would enable a range of perspectives regarding integrated care and its measurement to be captured thus providing detailed information about the evaluation of integrated care, the challenges and issues.

Ethics approval was granted by the University of Oxford’s Medical Sciences Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee (Reference: R59996/RE001). All participants provided written consent via a secure online consent form prior to taking part.

Participants

Twenty-five people (19 professional stakeholders and 6 patient representatives) took part in a qualitative interview. Nineteen stakeholders responded to the email invitation and were interviewed. The remainder did not respond ( n  = 14), could not be reached (e.g. undeliverable email) ( n  = 6), or were too busy to participate ( n  = 1). Seven patient representatives contacted the research team expressing an interest in participating in the study, before recruitment was stopped due to sufficient numbers being reached. Six patient representatives were interviewed. The average duration of interviews was approximately 30 min. The roles and affiliations of professional stakeholders are summarised below (note that three stakeholders also held clinical roles):

Two senior representatives of NHS England;

Four stakeholders in lead roles within Clinical Commissioning Groups (bodies responsible for the purchase of local health care services);

Three stakeholders in lead roles within other NHS bodies (e.g. Health and Care Partnerships);

Four senior representatives of local authorities (bodies responsible for the provision of local public services, including social care). One of these representatives held a joint role with a Health and Care Partnership;

One senior representative from the Local Government Association;

Four senior representatives of health and/or care focussed charities;

and a senior academic working in the field of integrated care.

A semi-structured interview guide (see Table  1 ) was developed following a review of relevant literature [ 18 ], and focused on the benefits of integrated care and how it should be evaluated. The guide was tested in two mock interviews (led by HC and LK), amended, and further refined after the first few interviews to allow broader exploration of available metrics for integrated care, and their selection. All interviews were conducted over the telephone between November 2018 and January 2019 (by HC, JH, or LK) and audio-recorded with the participants’ consent.

Interviews were transcribed verbatim by a professional transcriber and checked against the audio-recording by a researcher (HC or LK), with corrections made as appropriate. All transcripts were anonymised.

A framework analysis was conducted in five stages: familiarization; identifying a thematic framework; indexing; charting; and mapping and interpretation [ 19 , 20 ]. The thematic coding framework was developed following familiarisation with the data set, and broadly followed the interview guide. The framework was discussed and agreed upon by all authors. Next, the data was indexed using NVivo 12 software. Finally, a chart summarising the relevant data for each case against each qualitative theme was developed to aid interpretation.

Quotations from professional stakeholders are shown as “S” followed by an ID number. The following hierarchy of descriptors can be referred to when interpreting the results:

Most or majority (≥75% of participants)

Many or often (51–74% of participants)

Some or several (26–50% of participants)

A few or limited (≤25% of participants)

Three overarching themes arose from the data, and they are discussed in turn below. The first theme is concerned with how participants viewed integrated care and its benefits. The second theme focuses on potential measures for integrated care. The final theme explores some broader contextual and methodological considerations surrounding assessing benefits of integration initiatives.

Integrated care and its benefits

When asked to define integrated care, the majority of stakeholders first and foremost defined it from the perspective of the patient or service user as an approach that coordinates services around the individual to fulfil their needs. Most went on to state that a key purpose of taking a person-centred approach to integrated care is to achieve better outcomes for patients and service users, for example, keeping people in their homes for longer, maintaining independence, reducing unnecessary admissions, improving health outcomes, and quality of life. In addition to improved outcomes, the potential for integrated care to provide patients with a better experience of care was also raised by stakeholders. Examples given of what a better patient experience may look like included: improved access to services, smoother transitions between services, increased involvement in decision-making, receiving the right care at the right time in the right place, and telling ‘their story’ less frequently.

Secondary to the person-focused definition offered above, some stakeholders provided a systems-focused perspective of integrated care, as an activity that coordinates or brings services together to provide ‘joined-up’ or ‘seamless’ care. Some outlined this vision in greater detail, specifying the services involved in integration (e.g. health, community, voluntary, and social care), as well as detailing the mechanisms by which integrated care can be achieved, for example, vertical or horizontal integration, and multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs). It is important to note that most stakeholders provided a systems-focused perspective in addition to the person-centred definitions given, outlining the structures and processes necessary in order to achieve better outcomes and experiences for patients. For example, one stakeholder spoke about how improvements to the structure of the health and care systems, specifically the integration of IT systems, could benefit patients:

“We don’t have a single joined up system. We don’t yet really have shared information systems which are incredibly important. And they're incredibly important enabler for integration. And so that’s what it's about for me – joining up information, making sure that care professionals have access to the right levels of information that they can use to make joint decisions that are with the patient as well, to improve the patient and service user outcomes.” (S10, Programme Lead, Clinical Commissioning Group)

Although structures and processes were discussed, the benefits of integrated care were generally coached in terms of the patient or service user. A few stakeholders further emphasised a person-centred approach by specifically stating that the end goal of integrated care is not the integration of structures, but rather the outcomes that can be achieved:

“It's [integrated care] about the experience and the improved outcomes that it brings to people, that is what it's all about; it's not about structures … it's about improving people's health and well-being, it's about closing health and inequalities, it's about keeping people well at home, giving them a better, more co-ordinated experience of care, about helping them to help themselves, about using, all of the assets in a place to support the community to live as happily and independently and safely as they can. And so that’s what integrated care is to us. It's not a thing in itself; it's the outcomes that it achieves.” (S9, Senior Advisor, Local Government Association)

The benefits of integrated care to service providers were also discussed, albeit less than the benefits to patients and service users, with two key areas of benefit raised. Firstly, many stated improved service efficiencies as a key benefit, achieved through more efficient pathways, reduced duplication of work (e.g. reduced number of assessments), reduced admissions, and an improved ability to make decisions, plan, and co-ordinate care. Secondly, the potential for integrated care to reduce costs was often discussed, although there were discrepancies between stakeholders regarding whether savings could be realised, with several acknowledging that this was not a given and that current evidence to support this was limited. In addition to these two key areas, a few stakeholders also highlighted the potential for integrated care to improve the experience and retention of staff.

Providing a definition of integrated care was more challenging for patient representatives. However, of those who were able, they provided similar albeit less detailed definitions than professional stakeholders, focused on bringing services together for the benefit of the patient:

“different organisations getting together … clinicians, carers, community people, researchers, research scientists, sharing knowledge and sharing anything that might be relevant to the patient that might improve the outcome to a patient” (Patient Representative 3)

Furthermore, patient representatives also provided similar descriptions of the benefits of integrated care, with a particular focus on streamlining processes to benefit the patient; for example, having one point of contact and being asked fewer times for the same information.

Measures of integrated care

All professional stakeholders discussed how they thought integrated care should be evaluated, both in terms of the aspects to evaluate and how best to measure those aspects. Several professional stakeholders spoke about the difficulty of measuring the impact of integrated care, particularly with regards to the challenges faced when selecting appropriate measures, and assessing the benefits to patients and service users. Under current arrangements, with diverse measures employed across the system, a few stakeholders mentioned that it was impossible to draw general conclusions about the effectiveness of alternative models of integration. As one might expect, patient representatives discussed the measurement of integrated care in much less detail than professional stakeholders. While various system metrics were raised as possible measures of integrated care, patient representatives generally thought evaluation should focus on patients’ experiences of care, and any improvements in patient outcomes.

Three broadly distinct types of measure of the benefit of integration were discussed: system effects, patient experience and patient outcomes.

System effects

System metrics were commonly referred to by stakeholders when discussing measures of integrated care, of which, delayed transfers of care (DTOC), number of emergency admissions, and length of stay, all of which relate to hospital care, were among those most frequently mentioned. While there was great awareness among stakeholders of metrics used to assess system outcomes, and their value acknowledged, many felt that evaluations of integrated care focus too heavily on system effects. Concerns were raised that such an approach is too narrow and does not necessarily effectively evaluate the broader impact of integrated care and the benefits to patients. In particular, some regarded these metrics as ‘blunt instruments’ that do not capture the true impact and benefits of integrated care as defined by stakeholders, i.e. whether system changes are improving patient experiences and outcomes:

“The outcomes often associated with integrated care are hardcore metrics like reductions of emergency admissions, unplanned admissions, length of stay and that sort of thing … these are the metrics that they use to measure integrated care against, don’t actually demonstrate an effective connection, and that’s because those metrics in themselves aren't particularly sensitive to what is the aspiration of integrated care.” (S11, Senior Academic, University)

Vast awareness and use of system metrics is, in part, likely explained by the requirement of regulators to collect data on certain system outcomes, for example, Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOC). An Assistant Director at a local authority questioned this focus:

“The sign of a good performing system is that you have low levels of DTOC … yes, it's nice to have a low level of DTOC, but that still means that the person's been in hospital. They could have been in hospital for three or four weeks. Is that necessarily a good experience for them? … Sometimes we latch onto a particular measurement and then say, "Oh yeah, your system's performing well because you’ve got a really low DTOC." Well, not if you’ve got really high non-elective admissions and really high readmissions and really high residential admissions … that tells me that the system's not operating as well as it could.” (S4, Assistant Director, Local Authority)

Patient experiences

The majority of participants spoke about the need to measure patients’ experiences, with a few specifically extending this to include the experiences of carers and / or family members. Furthermore, several thought it also important to measure the experiences of the workforce.

Patient representatives frequently referred to experiences of care, talking about their own experiences from a patient or carer perspective, as well as referring to the experiences of others (e.g. family, friends and neighbours). One patient representative described the experience of their neighbour:

“She suffered a mental health breakdown with two young children, and the [city] social services department took six months to assess her. And even then they didn’t complete the assessment because the lady was homeless. And they moved her to temporary accommodation into the neighbouring borough of [location], where they had to start the whole process again because they said they'd lost the papers … So, there's no communication between one department and another department.” (Patient Representative 1)

This focus reinforces the stakeholders’ views of the importance of measuring patients’ experiences of care.

Some difficulties around measuring patients’ experiences were raised by stakeholders, for example, often patients and service users provide a positive report of their care despite negative aspects occurring, which often only come to light during subsequent discussions with the patient.

Patient outcomes

In general, stakeholders discussed patient-related outcomes in broader terms than they had discussed system effects. For example, some stakeholders advocated the importance of patient outcomes but generally without specificity or detail. This may be an effect of system outcomes being measured more frequently, and therefore, system metrics being better known to stakeholders than patient outcome measures. This was not true of all, with a few participants able to discuss dimensions to be measured (e.g. wellbeing, functionality, and pain), and tools that could be used to elicit such data, in much greater detail.

Several stakeholders called for a wider “ basket of measures ” to broaden measurement beyond system effects when evaluating the success of integrated care programmes. A few felt that measuring patient outcomes should be central to evaluations, for example, a Senior Associate of a charity stressed that “fundamentally, the best judge of a service or a package of services, is from the perspective of the people experiencing care” (S1, Senior Associate, Charity).

Overall, very few specific health indicators were referred to, with life expectancy, functionality, and dental decay among those mentioned. The majority of discussion was about patient- or carer- reported outcomes. Quality of life, well-being, or specific aspects of quality of life, such as pain, anxiety, and depression were raised by the majority of stakeholders as aspects of integrated care that should be evaluated. The value of measuring aspects such as these was highlighted in an example shared by a Senior Manager, who described an instance where a GP visited an elderly man with multiple conditions nearing end of life:

“And the GP thought, 'Well what can I do for this guy?' and he... so he just asked him. He said, "I'd really like my beard trimmed." So, he kind of got a barber to come round and trim his beard and he said it kind of transformed this guy's kind of, you know, you know, made him feel so much better. And his blood pressure was lower and things like that. We don’t... but we don’t kind of pick that up. I think all you'd pick up was the fact that whether the GP went there and how long he was there for, or she was there for, you know.” (S6, Senior Manager, County Council)

However, a few held some reservations about collecting such data due to its subjective nature, and problems with measurement (e.g. comparability):

“I might say my quality of life's really high and I enjoy my life; I could live in absolute squalor. And other people would say my quality of life is very poor. So, I think it's more difficult around quality of life … I think it is right that we ask the question, but I think it's one of those ones that you need to think about that is subjective.” (S4, Assistant Director, County Council)

Patient-reported measurement instruments

When asked about available patient-reported measures for assessing integrated care, broadly speaking, stakeholders working at a national level (e.g. national charities) and in academia were far more familiar with specific measures than those working at a local level (e.g. County Councils and Clinical Commissioning Groups). Measures named, included, the Patient-Centred Coordinated Care Experience Questionnaire (P3CEQ), the Friends and Family Test, the Patient Activation Measure (PAM-13), the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS), and the EuroQol 5 Dimensions (EQ-5D). None of the measures named were strongly advocated by the professional stakeholders. Although patient representatives did not specifically name any patient-reported measurement instruments, many had previously seen or completed patient-reported outcome or experience questionnaires as part of their care. One patient representative described their experience:

“I have endless review questionnaires following interventions about, you know, pain scores and all that sort of stuff. Can we do this, can we do that more, you know, was it better, was it worse, was it just the same. But no, I personally, have a bit of trouble with those as a patient because ticking boxes and being a human being don’t seem very compatible to me, but I do understand that it's the way we measure things. And I know you get something from it which translates into something which will help me.” (Patient Representative 4)

Contextual considerations

In addition to discussing potential measures for integrated care, stakeholders also raised some additional factors for consideration when evaluating integrated care programmes. Both professional stakeholders and patient representatives raised queries around the purpose of data collection in health and care settings. One patient representative discussed the lack of transparency with patients regarding the purpose for which data is collected, referring to “ endless surveys ” that go “ into a dark hole and you assume that nobody ever reads” (Patient Representative 4). Several professional stakeholders called for greater clarity around why data is being collected and how that data will be used:

“The other thing that worries me is are we using that data? … it's very fashionable to talk about, you know, people's mental health and all this sort of stuff, so people feel that they ought to collect it, but people should only be collecting it if they're going to use it, you know. If, you should only be asking these people these questions if they’ve got a plan for that data. If they just want to kind of want to put it on a database somewhere and forget about it then it’s unethical.” (S6, Senior Manager, Council)

A further issue, raised by a few stakeholders, was around the tensions between collecting data for use at a local or national level. While stakeholders recognised the need to collect data at a national level to allow comparisons to be drawn between providers, there were concerns that national level data lacked local relevance, and necessitated a loss of local data ownership. An Assistant Director at a Council questioned the value of nationally imposed metrics:

“We are supposed to work in an integrated way and cooperate, but I think the culture that underpins that has been one of intimidation from the top. An insistence of further solutions by certain providers being delivered, and whether you’ve got a top driven set of metrics that have come from NHS England and don’t reflect the reality of local government funding. Those metrics become either as just a stick to beat people with. And it doesn’t help the integration of human beings working together on the ground; it gets in the way.” (S15, Assistant Director, Council)

Qualitative methods

Qualitative methods of evaluating integrated care were increasingly being used or advocated by many stakeholders in order to overcome difficulties they had experienced with quantitative evaluation of integrated care initiatives. A senior academic discussed their qualitative approach to evaluation:

“We get people to define what is it you wanted to get out of it and did integrated care actually help you? So, it's impossible to plonk it on a politician's desk and say, 'You know, with this integrated care initiative, X number of outcomes were achieved,' because it's not like that. Integrated care is much more evaluation of a process. And individually, did the processes actually facilitate some kind of improvement?” (S11, Senior Academic, University)

Stakeholders often discussed the use of qualitative methods to capture data about the benefits of integrated care from the patients’ perspective. Some advocate these methods as a way of hearing the stories of patients. Despite discussing the benefits of a qualitative approach, it was acknowledged that there is still a need for good metrics with which to evaluate and report on integrated care.

“Asking the person at the end of it how integrated their experience has been and then acting on what they tell us. It's experiential, it's qualitative and it's not going to be easily captured and quantified and reported upon.” (S15, Assistant Director, Council)

It has to be noted that while many stakeholders referred to “ qualitative ” approaches, it was evident that a few were in fact referring to patient experience surveys rather than qualitative methodological approaches, such as interviews and focus groups.

In this diverse sample of professional stakeholders and patient representatives with a range of interests in the process of integrating health and social care, there was striking optimism that increased integration would eventually yield substantial benefits to patients and users of services. There was consensus that currently health and social care services are a very long way from being integrated and that the main measures used to assess progress, such as delayed transfer of care, while important, do not directly address patient benefits.

When invited to consider how benefits of integration should be assessed, participants commonly referred to broadly expressed dimensions such as well-being and health-related quality of life. However such constructs were generally seen as difficult to operationalise and little specific evidence was cited of integration being assessed against outcomes such as well-being. Reference was also made by some participants to the potential value of capturing patients’ experiences of services, i.e. how services were experienced in terms of being joined up and coordinated. For some, such responses to integrated care would best be captured by qualitative and narrative methods.

Although there was broad agreement that progress in integration would be best captured through the measurement of experiences and outcomes (e.g. dimensions such as well-being), no single measure was widely cited. However, individuals were able to cite specific measures such as the Patient Activation Measure or EQ-5D as potentially relevant. Furthermore, stakeholders generally discussed the applicability of measures in broader terms rather than considering their relevance to specific groups.

Related to the lack of agreement about specific measures of outcomes of integration was widespread uncertainty as to where responsibility for outcomes assessment was best located, at local or national level. This uncertainty reinforced the sense that no shared metric could easily emerge that would inform the system as a whole of benefits of initiatives to develop integrated services.

The development of measures of health status, often referred to as patient-reported outcome measures, has been hailed as the most important scientific break-through in fifty years, permitting the evaluation of services by means of broad measures of health as viewed and valued by patients and the public [ 21 ]. There are now readily available validated measures of health intended to capture the benefits of system innovations in health and social care [ 22 , 23 ]. There are, in addition, attempts to define sets of indicators to assess and monitor integrated care [ 24 ], and logic models that delineate relationships between systems and outcomes [ 25 ]. It is clear that there still remains a substantial gulf between health services research and the world of everyday service providers, managers and commissioners, which is holding back the use of evaluative methods to inform innovation [ 26 ]. One aspect of the gulf is limited awareness of potentially relevant patient-reported outcome measures and their application.

One way in which this gulf could be narrowed is through the development and promotion of a core measurement set for integrated care, i.e. a standardised set of measures that represent the minimum group of processes, structures, and outcomes that should be collected and reported for all integrated care initiatives. This type of approach follows that set out by initiatives such as the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM), which focuses on the development of Standard Sets for use by health care providers [ 27 ], or the Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials (COMET) initiative, which aims to standardise measurement across clinical trials for a specific area of health or health condition [ 28 ]. At the heart of this type of approach is the identification and agreement of what matters most to patients and service users in terms of outcomes from services, together with the identification and agreement about best available specific measures of the most important outcomes.

A potential weakness of these conclusions is the sample size of respondents recruited to the study. An enormous array of professional, managerial and patient groups have an interest in the broad issue of integration of health and social care and the current study cannot claim to have fully sampled this diversity of views. The recruitment of professional participants with in-depth knowledge of integrated care led to a sample of professionals in more senior positions. However, further work would benefit from the inclusion of professionals of varying levels of seniority to capture a wider range of views. Patient representatives were less familiar with the term ‘integrated care’ and its definition, with some finding it difficult to answer some of the questions as a result. However, it is essential to include patient representatives, and further work is needed to explore how best to overcome terminology and conceptual barriers to participation. Interviews were also pragmatic and restricted in time to accommodate respondents’ time constraints.

This study makes an important contribution to understanding professional and lay stakeholders’ views on capturing the benefits of integrated care, but further work is needed to better understand the challenges of measuring health outcomes and patient, informal carers, and staff experiences as part of integrated care evaluations. Patients and informal carers should be central to the development or selection of measures and indicators to ensure that they truly reflect any differences that integrated care has made.

The challenges of measuring integrated care are well documented. In this paper, we sought the views of professional stakeholders and patient representatives about how best to measure the integration of health and social care, and the benefits of integrated care approaches. Stakeholders primarily defined integrated care and its benefits from the patients’ perspective, however, there was consensus among stakeholders that there is not yet enough focus on patient benefit. There is potential for this to be overcome as validated patient-reported measures of health are available. However, there is currently limited awareness of measures of key constructs such as wellbeing among stakeholders, and therefore considerable scope for developing consensus on optimal measures. The study provides clear evidence that the prospect of directly assessing patient benefits of the integration of health and social care services is feasible, although still quite distant.

Availability of data and materials

Due to ethical concerns, the interview transcripts cannot be made openly available.

Abbreviations

Core outcome measures in effectiveness trials

Delayed transfers of care

EuroQol 5 dimensions

International consortium for health outcomes measurement

Integrated care systems

Multi-disciplinary team

National health service

Patient-centred coordinated care experience questionnaire

Patient activation measure

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the professional stakeholders and patient representatives for participating in the qualitative interviews.

This paper reports independent research funded by the Policy Research Programme (PRP) in the Department of Health and Social Care England, firstly through the Quality and Outcomes of Person-centred Care Policy Research Unit (QORU), and subsequently the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Policy Research Unit (PRU) on Quality, Safety, and Outcomes (QSO) (PR-PRU-1217-20702). This study was also funded by the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) Oxford at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. The funders set only broad areas for long term programmes of research, such as quality and outcomes of health and social care services. They were not involved in the research question, design, data collection and analysis, manuscript preparation or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

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RF and MP conceived of the study with all authors contributing to its design. HC, JH, and LK collected the interview data. HC led the analysis of interview data, with the support of RF and MP. HC led on drafting the manuscript with input from RF, JH, LK and MP. All authors have critically reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Crocker, H., Kelly, L., Harlock, J. et al. Measuring the benefits of the integration of health and social care: qualitative interviews with professional stakeholders and patient representatives. BMC Health Serv Res 20 , 515 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05374-4

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The use of social network analysis in social support and care: a systematic scoping review protocol

• Rosario Fernández-Peña   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6830-6001 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• María-Antonia Ovalle-Perandones 3 , 4 ,
• Pilar Marqués-Sánchez 3 ,
• Carmen Ortego-Maté 1 , 2 &
• Nestor Serrano-Fuentes 3 , 5  

Systematic Reviews volume  11 , Article number:  9 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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In recent decades, the literature on Social Network Analysis and health has experienced a significant increase. Disease transmission, health behavior, organizational networks, social capital, and social support are among the different health areas where Social Network Analysis has been applied. The current epidemiological trend is characterized by a progressive increase in the population’s ageing and the incidence of long-term conditions. Thus, it seems relevant to highlight the importance of social support and care systems to guarantee the coverage of health and social needs within the context of acute illness, chronic disease, and disability for patients and their carers. Thus, the main aim is to identify, categorize, summarize, synthesize, and map existing knowledge, literature, and evidence about the use of Social Network Analysis to study social support and care in the context of illness and disability.

This scoping review will be conducted following Arksey and O'Malley's framework with adaptations from Levac et al. and Joanna Briggs Institute’s methodological guidance for conducting scoping reviews. We will search the following databases (from January 2000 onwards): PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science Core Collection, SCOPUS, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, PROSPERO, and DARE. Complementary searches will be conducted in selected relevant journals. Only articles related to social support or care in patients or caregivers in the context of acute illnesses, disabilities or long-term conditions will be considered eligible for inclusion. Two reviewers will screen all the citations, full-text articles, and abstract the data independently. A narrative synthesis will be provided with information presented in the main text and tables.

The knowledge about the scientific evidence available in the literature, the methodological characteristics of the studies identified based on Social Network Analysis, and its main contributions will highlight the importance of health-related research's social and relational dimensions. These results will shed light on the importance of the structure and composition of social networks to provide social support and care and their impact on other health outcomes. It is anticipated that results may guide future research on network-based interventions that might be considered drivers to provide further knowledge in social support and care from a relational approach at the individual and community levels.

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Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a research approach within the social and behavioral sciences which focuses on ways of interaction and interconnection between individuals and social groups to explain social patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors [ 1 , 2 ]. In recent decades, research based on SNA has been increasingly used in health, including areas such as disease transmission, health behavior, organizational networks, social capital, and social support [ 3 , 4 , 5 ].

The literature on social networks and health begins by referring to the idea that people are embedded in a network of relationships. The first empirical studies were published in the Annual Review of Public Health in the mid-1990s [ 6 ]. They showed the usefulness of specific SNA techniques to evaluate prevention programs among the involved organizations [ 7 ], or the relationship between HIV status, drug use and sexual relations [ 8 ]. Since then, there has been an exponential increase in scientific publications based on this methodology, especially in the last decade.

Different SNA studies have focused on showing the relationship between the characteristics of the social network and different health-related outcomes such as health behaviors [ 9 , 10 ], satisfaction with social support in chronic illness [ 11 ], quality of care and patient safety [ 12 ], the influence of social networks on HIV prevention and treatment outcomes [ 13 ], behavior change and risk of disease transmission [ 14 ], or performance in health care organizations and health care providers [ 15 , 16 , 17 ]. Also, SNA has been applied in health interventions based on social networks [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ].

As mentioned above, one of the application areas of SNA is social support. The current epidemiological trend is characterized by a progressive increase in the population’s ageing and the incidence of long-term conditions. Thus, it seems relevant to highlight the importance of both social support and care systems to guarantee the coverage of health and social needs within the context of acute illness, chronic disease, and disability for patients and their careers. In its conceptual differentiation, caring and social support are dynamic processes that allude to interpersonal relationships [ 5 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]. However, they exist predominantly in separate domains. Care belongs to the professional context, while social support refers mainly to non-professional providers [ 25 ]. Unlike other approaches, research that uses SNA to study social support and care considers the network’s structural properties as the object of study [ 26 , 27 ] to know their relationship with other variables of interest. In this review, social networks are considered a structural framework to understand social support and care as relational concepts or as resources transferred through relationships [ 28 , 29 ]. Since there is no previous research that synthesizes the current knowledge on this research topic, we aim to identify, categorize, summarize, synthesize, and map existing knowledge, literature, and evidence about social network analysis to study social support and care in patients or caregivers in the context of illness, disability, or long-term conditions.

A scoping review is selected as an exploratory form of knowledge synthesis due to the extensive and growing literature that uses SNA in social support and care. This type of review is commonly undertaken to examine the extent, range, and nature of research activity in a topic area [ 30 ]: (a) to identify the types of available evidence in a given field, (b) to clarify key concepts/definitions in the literature, (c) to examine how research is conducted on a certain topic or area, (d) to identify key characteristics or factors related to a concept, (e) as a precursor to a systematic review, and (f) to identify and analyze knowledge gaps [ 31 ].

Arksey and O’Malley’s methodology framework [ 32 ], its advance by Levac and colleagues [ 33 ], and Joanna Briggs Institute’s methodological guidance [ 34 ] will be followed to conduct this scoping review through five stages: (a) identifying and stating research questions, (b) identifying relevant studies, (c) study selection, (d) charting data, and (e) collating and summarizing results [ 32 ].

This protocol is registered within the Open Science Framework platform (registration ID: https://osf.io/dqkb5 ). This scoping review has been reported using PRISMA-P [ 35 ] (Additional file 1 ). The final output will adhere to the Preferred Reporting for Systematic Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist [ 36 ].

Stage 1: identification of the research question

The following research questions will guide the review:

What scientific evidence or studies are available in the literature on social support and care using the SNA methods?

What methodological characteristics constitute this body of literature?

What are the main contributions of these studies?

What knowledge and research gaps can be identified in the literature?

Stage 2: identifying relevant studies

The PCC framework (Population-Concept-Context) (Table 1 ) will be used to clearly define the concepts in the main review question, determine the eligibility of studies and guide the selection process [ 34 ]. We use a glossary of Terms for Community Heath Care from the World Health Organization to clarify the concepts used in our review [ 37 ].

The limits to be used in online databases searches will be: articles published in Spanish and English and the year of publication (from January 2000 onwards). The inclusion criteria will be (a) empirical studies with SNA methodology (quantitative or mixed methods design) and (b) studies whose participants are patients or caregivers as receivers of care or social support in the context of illness or disability provided by both, health professionals or personal/informal contacts with no age limits. The exclusion criteria will be (a) theoretical papers, (b) grey literature, and (c) qualitative studies.

The PRISMA flow chart [ 38 ] (Additional file 2 ) will capture and present our planned screening and selection process. The search strategy developed by MAOP will follow a comprehensive and sequential three steps and be checked by RMM. The Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies Evidence-Based Checklist (PRESS EBC) will be followed to assess the search strategy's quality [ 39 ].

In the first step, the authors will work with an initial limited search in the PubMed database. The keywords and index terms will be identified in the titles and abstracts of the retrieved papers. In the second step, these keywords and index terms will be used to search across different databases. A structured search strategy will include Boolean operators (and, or, not), and truncations, either individually or in combination to ensure the search process. We will search the following databases: PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science Core Collection, SCOPUS, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, PROSPERO, and DARE (see Additional file 3 for search strategy). In a third step, a primary source search will be driven in the following journals: Social Networks, Connections, Journal of Social Structure, Redes, and Portularia. The retrieved references will be managed, and duplicates will also be removed using Mendeley and excel spreadsheet as a data extraction tool for the study selection.

Stage 3: study selection

Titles and abstracts of identified records will be assessed by two authors (RFP and NSF), independently. Disagreements will be resolved by consensus or with the assistance of a third author (PMS). The selected studies’ full text will be retrieved and checked independently by two authors (RFP and NSF). Sources of information that do not meet the eligibility criteria will be disregarded. A record of those sources and the reasons for their exclusion will be kept in a separate file.

Quality assessment

Scoping reviews are designed to provide an overview of the existing literature, regardless of quality. Therefore, a formal assessment of the quality of the included studies will not be conducted [ 32 ].

Stage 4: charting the data

The data charting aims to provide a descriptive summary of the results that align with this scoping review’s research questions. Thus, a data extraction tool designed for this study has been adapted from the template data extraction instrument for scoping reviews provided for JBI Manual for evidence synthesis [ 34 ] and will be used to capture the research purpose's most relevant information (see Table 2 ).

Charting the results will be an iterative process. Table 2 will be updated continuously until the end of the analysis. We will trial the extraction form on two or three sources to ensure all relevant results are extracted by at least two members of the review team [ 34 ].

Stage 5: collating and summarizing our results

According to the data extraction template, the obtained information will be part of built evidence tables with an overall description of the papers. We will follow the Arksey and O’Malley’s methods [ 32 ] to provide a descriptive numerical analysis of the topic, including the extent, characteristics, and their distribution in the included studies. We will present specific features and outcome measures of all included studies in a diagrammatic or tabular form. A descriptive summary will accompany the tabulated and/or charted results and will describe how the results relate to the review objectives and questions. This procedure will allow identifying specific gaps in the literature that might require further research.

The results of this scoping review will be added to the existing review articles on the use of the SNA in the health research area as complex health care interventions [ 40 ], the behavior change [ 41 ], nursing [ 42 ], inter-organizational networks [ 43 ], or healthcare providers [ 44 ]. Specifically, this protocol describes a systematic method synthesizing the existing literature on the use of SNA to study social support and care within the context of illness and disability.

This type of review is a convenient tool to determine the coverage of the body of literature on this specific area and will give a precise indication of the number of studies available and an overview of its focus. It might be useful for uncovering emerging evidence when it is still unclear what other more explicit questions can be addressed by a more precise systematic review [ 45 ]. Thus, the broader scope and nature justify the election of a scoping review versus a traditional systematic review that would answer specific questions and require more expansive inclusion criteria [ 31 ].

The authors anticipate that this review’s results will shed light on the importance of the structure and composition of social networks to provide social support and care and their impact on other health outcomes. This differs from many studies in this topic which use non-network approaches. The knowledge about the scientific evidence available in the literature, the methodological characteristics of the studies identified based on SNA, and its main contributions will highlight the importance of health-related research’s social and relational dimensions. Furthermore, it will identify areas for future research where social networks might be considered drivers to provide further knowledge in social support and care from a relational approach at the individual and community levels. The findings of this study will be disseminated through peer-review publications and national and international conferences.

Availability of data and materials

Further information related to this review can be provided upon reasonable request. Interested readers should contact the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

To Mr. Roberto Martín Melón, Librarian of the Medicine Area of the University of Cantabria, for his collaboration in the literature search process. To Professor Jose Luis Molina of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Professor Isidro Maya-Jariego of the University of Seville for their support in consultations during the review work.

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Rosario Fernández-Peña, María-Antonia Ovalle-Perandones, Pilar Marqués-Sánchez & Nestor Serrano-Fuentes

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RFP conceived the study. NSF, PMS, and COM contributed to the study conceptualization. MAOP will carry out the search strategy. RFP and NSF will perform the initial screening of the articles and PMS, COM, and MAOP will be involved in the study methodology, screening, and data extraction. All authors have read and approved the final version of this protocol.

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Additional file 1..

PRISMA-P 2015 Checklist.

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PRISMA-Flow Diagram.

Additional file 3.

Literature search strategy.

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Fernández-Peña, R., Ovalle-Perandones, MA., Marqués-Sánchez, P. et al. The use of social network analysis in social support and care: a systematic scoping review protocol. Syst Rev 11 , 9 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-021-01876-2

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Research Topics & Ideas: Mental Health

100+ Mental Health Research Topic Ideas To Fast-Track Your Project

If you’re just starting out exploring mental health topics for your dissertation, thesis or research project, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll help kickstart your research topic ideation process by providing a hearty list of mental health-related research topics and ideas.

PS – This is just the start…

We know it’s exciting to run through a list of research topics, but please keep in mind that this list is just a starting point . To develop a suitable education-related research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , and a viable plan of action to fill that gap.

If this sounds foreign to you, check out our free research topic webinar that explores how to find and refine a high-quality research topic, from scratch. Alternatively, if you’d like hands-on help, consider our 1-on-1 coaching service .

Overview: Mental Health Topic Ideas

• Mood disorders
• Anxiety disorders
• Psychotic disorders
• Personality disorders
• Obsessive-compulsive disorders
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Neurodevelopmental disorders
• Eating disorders
• Substance-related disorders

Mood Disorders

Research in mood disorders can help understand their causes and improve treatment methods. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

• The impact of genetics on the susceptibility to depression
• Efficacy of antidepressants vs. cognitive behavioural therapy
• The role of gut microbiota in mood regulation
• Cultural variations in the experience and diagnosis of bipolar disorder
• Seasonal Affective Disorder: Environmental factors and treatment
• The link between depression and chronic illnesses
• Exercise as an adjunct treatment for mood disorders
• Hormonal changes and mood swings in postpartum women
• Stigma around mood disorders in the workplace
• Suicidal tendencies among patients with severe mood disorders

Anxiety Disorders

Research topics in this category can potentially explore the triggers, coping mechanisms, or treatment efficacy for anxiety disorders.

• The relationship between social media and anxiety
• Exposure therapy effectiveness in treating phobias
• Generalised Anxiety Disorder in children: Early signs and interventions
• The role of mindfulness in treating anxiety
• Genetics and heritability of anxiety disorders
• The link between anxiety disorders and heart disease
• Anxiety prevalence in LGBTQ+ communities
• Caffeine consumption and its impact on anxiety levels
• The economic cost of untreated anxiety disorders
• Virtual Reality as a treatment method for anxiety disorders

Psychotic Disorders

Within this space, your research topic could potentially aim to investigate the underlying factors and treatment possibilities for psychotic disorders.

• Early signs and interventions in adolescent psychosis
• Brain imaging techniques for diagnosing psychotic disorders
• The efficacy of antipsychotic medication
• The role of family history in psychotic disorders
• Misdiagnosis and delayed treatment of psychotic disorders
• Co-morbidity of psychotic and mood disorders
• The relationship between substance abuse and psychotic disorders
• Art therapy as a treatment for schizophrenia
• Public perception and stigma around psychotic disorders
• Hospital vs. community-based care for psychotic disorders

Personality Disorders

Research topics within in this area could delve into the identification, management, and social implications of personality disorders.

• Long-term outcomes of borderline personality disorder
• Antisocial personality disorder and criminal behaviour
• The role of early life experiences in developing personality disorders
• Narcissistic personality disorder in corporate leaders
• Gender differences in personality disorders
• Diagnosis challenges for Cluster A personality disorders
• Emotional intelligence and its role in treating personality disorders
• Psychotherapy methods for treating personality disorders
• Personality disorders in the elderly population
• Stigma and misconceptions about personality disorders

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders

Within this space, research topics could focus on the causes, symptoms, or treatment of disorders like OCD and hoarding.

• OCD and its relationship with anxiety disorders
• Cognitive mechanisms behind hoarding behaviour
• Deep Brain Stimulation as a treatment for severe OCD
• The impact of OCD on academic performance in students
• Role of family and social networks in treating OCD
• Alternative treatments for hoarding disorder
• Childhood onset OCD: Diagnosis and treatment
• OCD and religious obsessions
• The impact of OCD on family dynamics
• Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Causes and treatment

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Research topics in this area could explore the triggers, symptoms, and treatments for PTSD. Here are some thought starters to get you moving.

• PTSD in military veterans: Coping mechanisms and treatment
• Childhood trauma and adult onset PTSD
• Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) efficacy
• Role of emotional support animals in treating PTSD
• Gender differences in PTSD occurrence and treatment
• Effectiveness of group therapy for PTSD patients
• PTSD and substance abuse: A dual diagnosis
• First responders and rates of PTSD
• Domestic violence as a cause of PTSD
• The neurobiology of PTSD

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

This category of mental health aims to better understand disorders like Autism and ADHD and their impact on day-to-day life.

• Early diagnosis and interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder
• ADHD medication and its impact on academic performance
• Parental coping strategies for children with neurodevelopmental disorders
• Autism and gender: Diagnosis disparities
• The role of diet in managing ADHD symptoms
• Neurodevelopmental disorders in the criminal justice system
• Genetic factors influencing Autism
• ADHD and its relationship with sleep disorders
• Educational adaptations for children with neurodevelopmental disorders
• Neurodevelopmental disorders and stigma in schools

Eating Disorders

Research topics within this space can explore the psychological, social, and biological aspects of eating disorders.

• The role of social media in promoting eating disorders
• Family dynamics and their impact on anorexia
• Biological basis of binge-eating disorder
• Treatment outcomes for bulimia nervosa
• Eating disorders in athletes
• Media portrayal of body image and its impact
• Eating disorders and gender: Are men underdiagnosed?
• Cultural variations in eating disorders
• The relationship between obesity and eating disorders
• Eating disorders in the LGBTQ+ community

Substance-Related Disorders

Research topics in this category can focus on addiction mechanisms, treatment options, and social implications.

• Efficacy of rehabilitation centres for alcohol addiction
• The role of genetics in substance abuse
• Substance abuse and its impact on family dynamics
• Prescription drug abuse among the elderly
• Legalisation of marijuana and its impact on substance abuse rates
• Alcoholism and its relationship with liver diseases
• Opioid crisis: Causes and solutions
• Substance abuse education in schools: Is it effective?
• Harm reduction strategies for drug abuse
• Co-occurring mental health disorders in substance abusers

Choosing A Research Topic

These research topic ideas we’ve covered here serve as thought starters to help you explore different areas within mental health. They are intentionally very broad and open-ended. By engaging with the currently literature in your field of interest, you’ll be able to narrow down your focus to a specific research gap .

It’s important to consider a variety of factors when choosing a topic for your dissertation or thesis . Think about the relevance of the topic, its feasibility , and the resources available to you, including time, data, and academic guidance. Also, consider your own interest and expertise in the subject, as this will sustain you through the research process.

Always consult with your academic advisor to ensure that your chosen topic aligns with academic requirements and offers a meaningful contribution to the field. If you need help choosing a topic, consider our private coaching service.

You Might Also Like:

Good morning everyone. This are very patent topics for research in neuroscience. Thank you for guidance

What if everything is important, original and intresting? as in Neuroscience. I find myself overwhelmd with tens of relveant areas and within each area many optional topics. I ask myself if importance (for example – able to treat people suffering) is more relevant than what intrest me, and on the other hand if what advance me further in my career should not also be a consideration?

This information is really helpful and have learnt alot

Phd research topics on implementation of mental health policy in Nigeria :the prospects, challenges and way forward.

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Social Work Research Topics: 20+ Great Ideas for Inspiration

by  Antony W

April 19, 2022

This is a complete list of social work research topics in 2022.

Whether you’re in college pursuing an undergraduate degree or in the university doing masters or Ph.D. in social work, you’ll find this list helpful for coming up with a great topic idea for your research project.

Some of the areas of research in social work include employees’ skills, internal process, employees’ interactions with individuals, social concepts and theories, and principles in social entities.

Research in social work is about doing a systematic investigation of issues that affect social workers directly or indirectly. As a researcher, you’ll investigate the effectiveness of methods applied to identify, address, and solve problems that social workers deal with.

Because social work focuses on practical application, your research process should put more emphasis on the efficiency of the intervention methods that can help solve social issues such as deprivation.

The following are some of the social work research paper topics to give you an idea on how to come up with a unique subject to investigate in your research work:

General Social Work Research Topics

• The pervasiveness of displacement and its harsh consequences for street children
• An investigation of the unreported incidents of rape assault against women in the military – and how it affects their lives and service.
• Why is social and intellectual integration crucial for Down syndrome children?
• Parents suffering from bipolar disorder and how it affects their parenting and the lives of their children
• How foster children’s early childhood relocation leads to an antisocial lifestyle
• An examination of the distinctions and parallels between dyslexia and ADHD

Interesting Social Work Research Topics

• A study and comprehension of the stigma and social devaluation that welfare moms face.
• An examination of the societal consequences of adding sex education in high school curricula.
• A case study of how a functional and inclusive healthcare system contributes to societal progress.
• An in-depth examination of the effects of first-time menstruation on teenage females in foster care.
• The increasing influence and impact of social media on the lives of adolescent children
• How increasing housing costs in the United States are harming young millennial
• Abuse in families, including verbal and physical abuse, and how it shows in the lives of children

Social Work Thesis Research Topics

• The contrast between children displaced in conflict zones and children in foster care
• Compassion fatigue in counselors and social workers
• Differentiating between codependency and interdependence in adolescents and adults
• The psychological effects of emotionally immature parents on their adult offspring
• Navigating the academic challenges of visually impaired students

Human Service Research Paper Topics

• How America’s criminal justice system disproportionately impacts low-income and minority families.
• Why do welfare workers require treatment and support groups?
• Understanding gender disparity in the context of incarceration
• There are parallels between adolescent delinquency and adult imprisonment.
• Minority groups at the cost of the American criminal justice system

Social Work Research Topics for College Students

• Investigate the function of parent-child college dialogues as a moderator.
• Investigate the variables that influence teenage usage of drugs and other substances.
• Create a framework for assessing racial and ethnic disparities in the workplace.
• Examine the association between cultural acclimation and teenage academic achievement.
• Investigate methods of protecting pregnant women from being exposed to dangerous narcotic compounds.

Controversial Social Work Research Topics

• How incarceration has a detrimental influence on detained people’s psychological well-being
• How cognitive-behavioral therapy allows social workers to react to their surroundings and circumstances more effectively
• An investigational research on the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy to enhance jailed people’s lives.
• The negative consequences of legally signed child-parent separation and methods for mitigating it
• Providing safe spaces for minorities and the effects of community on their mental health
• Child poverty, food insecurity, and housing instability: how do these affect children’s academic abilities?
• How court-ordered incarceration fosters mental illness rather than facilitating correction
• The social and health consequences of a restriction on abortion for women in low-income communities

What Makes a Good Social Work Research Topic?

There are way too many social work research topic ideas that you can explore. But how do you determine which one to explore in your research?

Well, there are least four consideration to make before you conclude that a topic is worth further investigation.

First, do some preliminary research on the topic to determine whether there’s at least one published study that backs it up. We highly recommend that you look at peer-reviewed journals instead of daily news articles and blog posts.

Second, check if the topic is practical. There’s nothing wrong with theoretical research, of course, but practical knowledge and intervention would suffice better in this area of study.

Third, make sure the topic is current. In other words, the topic you select should align with the present tends because they give more significant advantages than topics that aren’t current by research standards.

Lastly, it would be great of the topic you choose can break preconceived notions about social work, as they to get more attention. Notably, these topics demand solid evidence, objective arguments, and substantial benefits. So if the topic you choose can feature the three elements, it can make a great fit for your social work research project.

Now that you have a list of 20+ social work research topic ideas, you should find it easy to identify a subject to explore in your research assignment.

If, on the other hand, you already have a topic to explore in your social work but you don’t have enough time to do the work, you can take advantage of research paper writing service by Help for Assessment and have the assignment completed for you in the shortest time possible.

Our writers have 5+ years of experience in writing research papers on any topic. So, you can place your order with confidence and assurance that we will deliver the best results to you.

About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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Building a better understanding of adult social care

Read the full collection: rethinking health and care systems.

• Related content
• Peer review
• Jon Glasby , director 1 ,
• Clenton Farquharson , chair 2 ,
• Liz Hanson , professor of caring sciences 3 4 ,
• Mirella Minkman , chief executive 5 6
• 1 IMPACT, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
• 2 Think Local Act Personal Partnership Board, London, UK
• 3 NKA (Swedish Family Care Competence Unit) Kalmar, Sweden
• 4 Linnaeus University, Sweden
• 5 Vilans (Dutch Institute for Long Term Care), Utrecht, Netherlands
• 6 School for Business and Society, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands
• Correspondence to: J Glasby J.Glasby{at}bham.ac.uk

Jon Glasby and colleagues suggest short and long term measures to tackle the invisibility of adult social care

In December 2022, the UK House of Lords Adult Social Care Committee argued that adult social care ( box 1 ) is largely “invisible”: something that happens behind closed doors, that is about “them” rather than “us,” and that is poorly understood by the public, the media, and policy makers. 1 Among many examples of this from their report was the view of Jeremy Hunt, former secretary of state for health and social care, that the invisibility of adult social care is “deeply entrenched” in our society. Another example was a November 2021 survey including 1561 unpaid family carers in the UK that suggested over 90% feel ignored by government. 2 A written submission from the Health Foundation to the committee reported that members of the public had a limited understanding of social care, had not thought about their own future care needs, and wrongly thought that future care will be funded through taxation. 1 3

What is adult social care?

Adult social care means the practical care and support that disabled and older people draw on to live their lives. It can include assistance with activities of daily living such as getting up/washing/getting dressed/eating/going to the toilet, as well as support for unpaid carers. While these are often associated with particular service models (home care, residential care, and so on), many countries enable people to choose how funding is spent on their behalf, playing an active part in co-designing their own support.

In the view of the committee, this results in services that are underfunded, a workforce that is undervalued and underpaid, and a system that is only really seen in terms of the impact it has on the health service, hardly ever in its own right. Although social care has come to national attention in recent years, the focus has been on the cost of care homes and paying for care for those who need it and not on the intrinsic value of enabling good lives. 1

We argue that these longstanding issues were particularly exposed during the pandemic, with tragic consequences. While some of our proposed solutions to tackling the invisibility of social care are more immediate, practical actions, others entail long term social, cultural, and political change. In making this case, we focus on insights from England, the Netherlands, and Sweden, selecting these to include a range of systems, including high tax or publicly funded Scandinavian services, more insurance based approaches, and a more mixed economy of care.

Focusing on health to the detriment of social care

During the pandemic, the immediate focus in many countries was on acute hospital care, with a tendency to overlook adult social care. 4 This had tragic consequences for many people’s lives and the wellbeing of care workers. 5 6 Whereas systems were rapidly put in place to supply hospitals with extra funding and as much personal protective equipment (PPE) as was available, social care staff were initially almost entirely neglected. 7 8 Restrictions on visitors to care homes also meant that many residents, some with dementia and near the end of their lives, were unable to see loved ones. 9

In England, the government was subsequently severely criticised over an early decision to discharge people from hospital to care homes without initially testing for covid-19, inadvertently spreading the virus to particularly clinically vulnerable populations. 5 10 In Sweden, in contrast to many other countries, the government’s initial emphasis was largely on advice and guidance, leading to greater degrees of personal freedom and a preference for voluntary social distancing rather than compulsory “lockdowns.” However, they were criticised for doing “too little, too late” in terms of enacting measures to sufficiently protect frail older people and other at-risk groups. 11 In the Netherlands, the first priorities were the availability of hospital and intensive care unit beds, making PPE available in clinical settings, and overall mortality rates, and not the quality of life of frail or disabled people in the community or the wellbeing of often unprotected care workers. 12

Longer term neglect

This prioritisation of health over social care was partly the result of an understandable desire to protect hospital services and intensive care in an unprecedented crisis. However, deep down, it was also to do with a broader failure by policy makers and by society as a whole to understand and value social care in its own right. 1

In England, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee argued that years of inattention, funding cuts, and delayed social care reforms were compounded by the government’s slow, inconsistent, and, at times, negligent approach to giving the sector the support it needed during the pandemic. 5 Examples of this neglect included the 25 000 people discharged from hospital to care homes without first being tested for covid-19 and delays in producing an action plan for social care (which came some four weeks after guidance had been produced for the NHS). 5

In Sweden, covid-19 shone a spotlight on existing problems, such as chronic underfunding, fragmentation, understaffing, insufficient education and training, inadequate managerial and medical support, and poor terms of employment. 11 13 14 For example, one quarter of the care workforce are employed by the hour, with staff sickness or self-isolation leading to even greater use of casual workers (often with less or no formal training). 14 There was a scarcity of PPE, especially in the first months, and care home residents, home care recipients, and care staff were not initially prioritised for testing. More than one third of care homes reported lacking preconditions to provide individual assessment and treatment for residents with covid-19. 14

In the Netherlands, the national expert committee advising the government was initially dominated by epidemiological and economic perspectives, with less social science input. 12 15 This meant that the focus was often on clinical issues, rather than broader impacts, such as the negative effects of multiple lockdowns on older or disabled people living alone or on youth mental health. As a result, there were considerable shortages of PPE for home care and nursing home staff—even greater than those in hospital services. Also, the national expert committee did not seem to discuss issues such as the best way to balance prevention of infection with the importance of (family) contact for people in care homes (particularly at the end of life). The overall situation was made worse by staff shortages, poor working conditions, and a lack of emphasis on infection prevention in such settings in the years before the pandemic. 12 15 16

As the pandemic progressed, there was greater recognition by policy makers, the media, and the public of the challenges facing adult social care. 5 However, most policies and media accounts tended not to consider social care in its broadest sense and on its own terms, focusing on parts that affect the health service, such as care homes and services for older people, and overlooking the experiences of disabled people of working age or on community services that support people to live independently in their own homes. 6 7 This led to care packages being reduced or cancelled, buildings such as day centres or respite units being closed, and people employing their own personal assistants unable to source PPE 7 —much of which initially went unreported and so was probably not apparent to the general public.

Even when policy makers became increasingly aware of these issues, action was limited by a lack of understanding of the nature of the sector. For example, English care services are provided by around 17 900 private, voluntary, and public organisations across 39 000 sites, 17 many of which are encouraged to compete with each other for public service contracts. This is different from the health service, where providing PPE (as one example) to large, publicly owned hospitals—while still challenging—is relatively straightforward in comparison.

Valuing social care in its own right

Adult social care funding is not “dead money” that governments have to spend to meet the basic needs of disabled and older people, but a form of social and economic investment we make in ourselves as a society. 18 19 Raising its profile defies simple answers, but possible solutions might entail a mix of short term, practical actions, alongside longer term social, cultural, and political changes.

Many adults have cross cutting health and social needs that span traditional professional and organisational boundaries. Raising the profile of adult social care within health services would therefore be an important first step. All health professionals can commit to increasing their personal understanding of social care and to building broader relations beyond the walls of their workplace. In practical terms, this might include a greater focus on interprofessional education in pre-qualifying and post-qualifying training programmes, 20 and medical revalidation processes. However, it might also entail individual professionals taking responsibility for their own development, above and beyond the formal mechanisms in place ( box 2 ).

Moving beyond professional boundaries for a better understanding of each other’s roles

Although only an anecdotal example, a powerful illustration of looking beyond our own professional boundaries is provided by a senior geriatrician who thought he knew little about the community services to which he discharged people from hospital. He therefore took a week’s leave and shadowed local home care workers. He was amazed by the complexity of needs which these workers manage on a daily basis, operating almost entirely on their own with minimal support and on very low wages. He now has much more confidence in the services which his patients receive after hospital and much more respect for partner agencies, using this to build a series of more effective interprofessional relationships which help him to navigate traditional service boundaries (personal communication). Clearly, individuals should not have to use their holiday to fix systemic problems, but there may be scope to build on these insights through more formal mechanisms such as joint training or shadowing schemes.

During the pandemic, radical changes were possible in timescales that would never usually be achievable. Many localities moved quickly to create a series of flexible, practical, joined-up services to meet people’s needs in an emergency, 7 12 often making considerable use of digital technology 21 and working closely with the voluntary and community sector. An important and life changing contribution was also made by families, volunteers, and local communities. 22 23 24 Indeed, a survey of at least eight European countries highlighted that the average number of weekly hours of care provided by family carers increased by nearly 20% during the pandemic, and over 10% of respondents started to provide care as a result of the pandemic. 25

While this was often born out of necessity and could be a source of considerable stress, it is an important reminder that the bulk of care has always been delivered by family and communities. Moreover, many social care services have historically been “deficit focused” (focusing on what is “wrong” with the person). In contrast, responses to covid-19 had to build on the community based supports we all draw on to live our lives, supplementing these networks and relationships with some formal support where needed. This might be described as being more community oriented and strengths based—and such approaches have much to offer more generally in terms of future social care reform. 26

Longer term government action is needed to build a stronger care and support infrastructure capable of overcoming the considerable workforce, funding, and service pressures being experienced in response to tightening fiscal budgets and population ageing and multimorbidity. 12 17 While this might look different in different countries, the House of Lords Adult Social Care Committee, 1 as one example, sets out a series of recommendations to achieve this, including a realistic, long term funding settlement; a properly resourced workforce strategy; and establishing a powerful national commissioner for care and support to strengthen the voice and identity of the sector. These calls are recent (December 2022) but the fact that they came from the heart of the UK establishment may give an indication of the real and current nature of these issues.

Above all, social care is perhaps its own worst enemy by tending to describe what it does in terms of a series of “services” that help people with particular “activities of daily living” ( box 1 ). Instead, it might be better to focus on the care and support on which we all draw to live our lives. For example, #SocialCareFuture is a UK coalition aiming to bring about long term change through a social movement rather than a specific health or social care policy. 19 Made up of people who draw on care and support, as well as families, professionals, managers, and politicians, the movement promotes a system of social care that helps people to lead their chosen lives. It argues: “We all want to live in the place we call home with the people and things that we love, in communities where we look out for one another, doing the things that matter to us . . . When organised well, social care helps to weave the web of relationships and support in our local communities that we can draw on to live our lives in the way that we want to, with meaning, purpose and connection, whatever our age or stage of life.” 19

It is hard to see how anyone could disagree with the #SocialCareFuture vision. The difficulty, of course, is taking a set of services which were not designed with these aspirations in mind and making such a vision a reality. As Peter Beresford, a social work academic, has commented 27 : “Social care is not rocket science. It is much more complex and subtle than that.” While the longstanding invisibility of adult social care was so tragically exposed during the covid-19 pandemic, this has also created a moment when there may be scope to better understand and value the contribution it makes, raise its profile, and build on lessons to better design and deliver adult social care and support in future.

Key messages

Adult social care is often largely “invisible”—low profile, poorly understood, and therefore often neglected by the public, the media, and policy makers

This was particularly apparent during the pandemic, with tragic consequences

We need to raise awareness of the importance of social care (with policy makers and the broader public), better understand the breadth of the contribution it makes, and develop a more positive vision for adult social care more generally

Contributors and sources: JG is a non-executive director of an NHS trust and of a local authority children’s service. He was a special adviser to the House of Lords Adult Social Care Committee. CF is a member of the Coalition for Personalised Care, the Social Care Sector COVID-19 Stakeholder Group, and the NHS Assembly and a trustee of the Race Equality Foundation, and the Social Care Institute for Excellence. LH is a board member and past president of Eurocarers, an expert adviser to the National Board of Health and Welfare in Sweden regarding informal (family) carers, care, and carers support. MM is a professor of innovation and the governance of integrated care at Tilburg University/TIAS and a board member of the International Foundation of Integrated Care. This article is based on insights from leading academics, people who draw on care and support, organisations that support unpaid family carers, and organisations that seek to implement evidence in adult social care, from England, the Netherlands, and Sweden, countries with a range of health and social care systems. All authors provided informal advice to the social care system and to national policy makers during the covid-19 pandemic.

Public and patient involvement: CF has personal experience of drawing on care and support, and chairs the board of Think Local Act Personal (a national partnership of more than 50 English organisations committed to transforming health and social care through personalisation and community based support). LH has been an unpaid carer to relatives in the UK and Sweden.

Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and have no interests to declare.

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

This article is part of a collection proposed by the Health Foundation, which also provided funding for the collection, including open access fees. The BMJ commissioned, peer reviewed, edited, and made the decision to publish these articles. Rachael Hinton and Paul Simpson were the lead editors for The BMJ .

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

• ↵ House of Lords Adult Social Care Committee. A “gloriously ordinary life”: spotlight on adult social care. Report of session 2022-23. House of Lords, 2022. https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/31917/documents/193737/default/
• ↵ Carers Trust. Over 90% of adult unpaid carers feel ignored by the government. 2022. https://carers.org/news-and-media/news/post/169-over-90-of-adult-unpaid-carers-feel-ignored-by-the-government
• ↵ Health Foundation. Written evidence to parliamentary health committee, 17 May 2022. (ASC0020). https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/108644/html
• ↵ Comas-Herrera A, Marczak J, Byrd W, Lorenz-Dant K, Patel D, Pharoah D, eds. LTCcovid contributors. LTCcovid international living report on covid-19 and long-term care. London School of Economics and Political Science. https://ltccovid.org/international-living-report-covid-ltc/
• ↵ House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. Readying the NHS and social care for the covid-19 peak. 2020. https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2179/documents/20139/default/
• Think Local Act Personal
• Shembavnekar N ,
• Comas-Herrera A ,
• Salcher-Konrad M ,
• Baumbusch J ,
• ↵ Booth R. Covid care home discharge policy was unlawful, says court. Guardian 2022 Apr 27. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/27/covid-discharging-untested-patients-into-care-homes-was-unlawful-says-court
• Ludvigsson JF
• Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid
• ↵ Public Health Agency of Sweden. Suggestions of measures for some of social services’ areas of work with the spread of infection with covid-19: reporting back from the government’s mission. Case no. 02934-2020 [in Swedish]. 2020. www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/
• ↵ Szebehely M. International experiences of covid-19 in nursing homes: background report for the government’s official investigation, SOU 2020:80 “Care of older people during the pandemic” [in Swedish]. Swedish Government, 2020.
• ↵ Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Met de kennis van straks. De wetenschap goed voorbereid op pandemieën. [With knowledge of the future. Science well prepared for pandemics]. 2022. https://storage.knaw.nl/2022-09/KNAW-Advies-Met-de-kennis-van-straks-De%20wetenschap-goed-voorbereid-op-pandemieen-260922.pdf
• ↵ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. Ervaringen en behoeften van ouderen tijdens de corona-epidemie: verder kijken dan virusbestrijding [In Experiences and needs of seniors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond virus control]. 2022. https://rivm.openrepository.com/handle/10029/626355
• Skills for Care
• Bennett M ,
• ↵ Social Care Future. A vision for the future of social care. https://socialcarefuture.org.uk/a-vision-for-the-future-of-social-care
• Carpenter J ,
• Dickinson H
• ↵ Swedish Agency for Health and Care Services Analysis. Under the circumstances: consequences of covid-19 for social services’ individual and family care services, Report 2021. 2021. https://www.vardanalys.se/rapporter/under-radande-omstandigheter/
• Bergmann M ,
• Tur-Sinai A ,
• Fabbietti P ,
• Fernandes-Jesus M ,
• Ntontis E ,
• Eurocarers/INRCA
• ↵ Social Care Institute for Excellence. Asset-based places: a model for development. July 2017. https://www.scie.org.uk/future-of-care/asset-based-places .
• ↵ Beresford P. What services users want. Guardian 2005 May 23. www.theguardian.com/society/2005/mar/23/thinktanks.longtermcare

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We use a variety of different methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to conduct research that can be used by social workers, leaders in the sector and policymakers to support children and their families.

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Including older people in health and social care research: best practice recommendations based on the INCLUDE framework

Affiliations.

• 1 Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
• 2 School of Medicine, Dentistry & Nursing, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
• 3 School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Health, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
• 4 Centre for Trials Research, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
• 5 National Institute for Health and Care Research, Clinical Research Network, UK.
• 6 Ageing and Movement Disorders Research Group, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
• 7 Academic Unit for Ageing and Stroke Research, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Bradford, UK.
• 8 Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, Kings College London, London, UK.
• 9 School for Social Policy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
• 10 Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
• 11 Elderly Care Department, University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust, Stoke-on-Trent, UK.
• 12 AGE Research Group, NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Cumbria Northumberland Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust and Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK.
• PMID: 37261448
• PMCID: PMC10234283
• DOI: 10.1093/ageing/afad082

Background: Older people are often explicitly or implicitly excluded from research, in particular clinical trials. This means that study findings may not be applicable to them, or that older people may not be offered treatments due to an absence of evidence.

Aims: The aim of this work was to develop recommendations to guide all research relevant to older people.

Methods: A diverse stakeholder group identified barriers and solutions to including older people in research. In parallel, a rapid literature review of published papers was undertaken to identify existing papers on the inclusion of older people in research. The findings were synthesised and mapped onto a socio-ecological model. From the synthesis we identified themes that were developed into initial recommendations that were iteratively refined with the stakeholder group.

Results: A range of individual, interpersonal, organisational, community and policy factors impact on the inclusion of older people in research. A total of 14 recommendations were developed such as removing upper age limits and comorbidity exclusions, involving older people, advocates and health and social care professionals with expertise in ageing in designing the research, and considering flexible or alternative approaches to data collection to maximise opportunities for participation. We also developed four questions that may guide those developing, reviewing and funding research that is inclusive of older people.

Conclusion: Our recommendations provide up to date, practical advice on ways to improve the inclusion of older people in health and care research.

Keywords: inclusion; older people; recommendations; socio-ecological model.

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Geriatrics Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected].

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Social Science Research Topics for Global Health and Wellbeing

Table of contents.

Open Philanthropy strives to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. To find the best opportunities to help others, we rely heavily on scientific and social scientific research.

If you know of any research that touches on these questions, we would welcome hearing from you. At this point, we are not actively making grants to further investigate these questions. It is possible we may do so in the future, though, so if you plan to research any of these, please email us .

Land Use Reform

Open Philanthropy has been making grants in land use reform since 2015. We believe that more permissive permitting and policy will encourage economic growth and allow people to access higher-paying jobs. However, we have a lot of uncertainty about which laws or policies would be most impactful (or neglected/tractable relative to their impact) on housing production.

• Why we care: We think that permitting speed might be an important category to target, but have high uncertainty about this. 
• What we know: There are a number of different studies of the effects of changes in zoning/land use laws (e.g. see a summary here in Appendix A), but we’re not aware of studies that attempt to disentangle any specific changes or rank their importance. We suspect that talking to advocates (e.g. CA YIMBY) would be useful as a starting point.
• Ideas for studying this: It seems unlikely that there have been “clean” changes that only affected a single part of the construction process, but from talking to advocates, it seems plausible that it would be possible to identify changes to zoning codes that primarily affect one parameter more than others. It also seems plausible that this is a topic where a systematic review, combining evidence from many other studies, would be unusually valuable.
• Why we care: We are highly uncertain about how to best encourage more construction, and thus about where to target our grants.
• What we know: there have been many recent changes to permitting requirements, such as the California ADU law that requires cities to respond to permit requests within 60 days and a new law in Florida that requires cities to respond to permit requests quickly or return permitting fees. This blog post by Dan Bertolet at Sightline predates those changes, but is the best summary we’ve seen on the impacts of permitting requirements.
• Ideas for studying this: one might compare projects that fall right below or above thresholds for permitting review (e.g. SEPA thresholds in Washington state), and try to understand how much extra delay projects faced as a result of qualifying for review. It could also be valuable to analyze the effects of the Florida law (e.g. a difference-in-difference design looking at housing construction in places that had long delays vs. short delays prior to the law passing).
• Why we care: Currently, estimates of this value are typically made at the level of the metro area, but it seems plausible that we should be differentiating more – e.g. putting higher values on units built in Manhattan relative to those built in Westchester.
• What we know: there’s a lot of work on the gradient of land/house prices with regards to transit costs across metro areas, but we aren’t aware of work that explicitly tries to estimate within-metro differences ( in the vein of Card, Rothstein, and Yi (2023) , for example) .
• Ideas for studying this: it should be possible to use similar designs looking at moves at a more granular level (e.g. rather than defining effects at the metro level, use changes in distance-weighted job availability). There may also be ways to directly use the land price gradient to estimate this (though in general that will also reflect amenity values).
• Why we care: Some people have proposed that a land value tax could encourage land redevelopment and reduce the economic inefficiency of taxation, but we do not know how well this reflects the real-world impact of land value taxes.
• What we know: Land value taxes have been used in some Pennsylvania cities, and in some countries outside the US. There has also been increasing interest in implementing a land value tax in other places (e.g. this FT editorial ). See here for many more arguments and references related to land value taxation.
• Ideas for studying this: one could use a difference-in-difference design looking at when cities adopt a land value tax (or a split value tax) and examine changes in construction or other outcomes (e.g. volume of land transactions). Alternatively, one could also try a border regression discontinuity looking at differences in land transactions or other metrics at the border between a place that implements a land value tax and one that does not.

Treatments now potentially within reach may extend the human lifespan and improve quality of life. We aim to support tractable and cost-effective research on the world’s most burdensome diseases , including cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, malaria, and others.

• Why we care: Open Philanthropy makes many grants focused on South Asian air quality . However, we still have a lot of uncertainty about the impacts of air pollution. One potentially important variable is the type of pollutant; it would be important for our grantmaking to know if some forms of pollution were much more impactful to reduce than others.
• What we know: We know that the components of PM 2.5 pollution can vary substantially by location. There has been some associational work done on this in the US context, but we are more interested in areas with high baseline PM 2.5 levels.
• Ideas for studying this: there is some existing data on how the components of PM 2.5 pollution vary across India. This could be linked with mortality data for associational studies. One could also use policy changes that changed the makeup of particulate emissions in a certain area as a natural experiment.
• Why we care: Open Philanthropy has made some grants attempting to influence public health regulation. We are interested in knowing how successful other philanthropists have been when making similar grants, and are particularly interested in knowing the effects of Bloomberg’s anti-tobacco advocacy, which we see as one of the most focused (and promising) programs of its type.
• What we know: there has been substantial research on the effects of tobacco policy, but we are not aware of any work that focuses specifically on the effect of Bloomberg’s investments.
• Ideas for studying this: some of Bloomberg’s grantmaking in tobacco is public ; one could use a variety of approaches to assess the impact of those grants (e.g. a synthetic control).
• Why we care: we have made grants on reducing lead exposure in low-income countries in the past and are likely to make more in the future. These grants are made assuming that lead affects both health and income, but we are quite uncertain about the magnitude of the effect of either, especially on health (where we think there is less data). Better estimates of the effect of lead on health would reduce the level of uncertainty around the cost-effectiveness of these grants.
• What we know: according to epidemiological (observational) studies , lead has negative impacts on cardiovascular health (see a helpful systematic review here ). However, there is limited causal evidence on the impacts of lead on cardiovascular disease in humans; our primary evidence comes from a study that leverages exposure to NASCAR races to determine changes in ischemic heart disease in the elderly, but we don’t know much about chronic exposure and are reluctant to rely heavily on a single study.
• Why we care: Open Philanthropy invests in vaccines for a variety of illnesses, with the primary (though not exclusive) goal of reducing mortality. Having better estimates for how properties of vaccines translate to demand and eventual health impact will help us prioritize when to support “good” leads in clinical trials vs. hold out longer for “great” ones.
• What we know: the efficacy of vaccines for different diseases varies considerably, and improved technologies can lead to more promising candidates even for diseases where one or more products are already available.
• Ideas for studying this: one could interact the efficacy of a given year’s vaccine (see data here for example) with propensity to get the flu vaccine to determine how this changed flu dynamics. (Though data from South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa would be even better.)
• Why we care: Much of Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking in global health R&D is focused on preventing malaria in high-risk populations (as are several charities recommended by GiveWell, with whom we work closely on global health). However, we have little causal evidence on the long-run effects of having had malaria, on either health or income. Thus, we do not have a good sense of the true (long-run) value of preventing malaria.
• What we know: a Mendelian study found that the likelihood of stunting increases with each malaria infection.
• Ideas for studying this: Mendelian randomization is a technique that looks at people with different genes to determine the causal impact of genes on observable outcomes. Being heterozygous for the sickle cell variant is symptomless but protective against malaria. Thus, those with sickle cell trait are less likely to get malaria and can be compared against those without the trait to understand the long-run impacts of malaria.
• Why we care: Open Philanthropy is interested in cost-effectively improving health. Fractional dosing has the potential to lower cost and expand coverage of vaccines. If we had better evidence on this topic, OP could know in which cases (if any) to advocate for more fractional dosing.
• What we know: a fractional dose for yellow fever and flu appeared to be non-inferior, but fractional dosing for polio was less successful.
• Ideas for studying this: we are not aware of any systematic review of fractional vaccine trials, but many such trials have been run. Studying this topic could involve simply examining data from past trials, rather than running new trials.
• What we know: as GBD covers all deaths and DALYs in the world, the team behind it necessarily spends limited time researching any one cause of DALYs. While GBD revisions attempt to address issues with previous estimates, we believe that there may still be substantial errors.
• Ideas for studying this: one could look for sharp changes in burden figures between the current and previous GBD studies, or examine a particular cause of death in detail and compare one’s own estimates to those generated by the GBD at different levels of age or geographic aggregation. 
• Why we care: new medications and medical technologies can substantially improve disease burdens and make treating or eliminating an illness more cost-effective. However, different countries adopt technologies at different rates; we are interested in knowing why. Open Philanthropy might then be able to make grants to encourage adoption of particularly promising technologies in underserved areas.
• What we know: it seems that patents, price regulation , and market structure affect drug adoption.
• Ideas for studying this: follow up on the approach in Kyle (2007) . One could extend her estimates to estimate the diffusion of FDA-approved drugs globally via patent filings and then look at predictors of diffusion: disease burden, GDP per capita, price controls, language (English vs. not), and path dependency (whether the same companies sell to the same countries repeatedly).
• Why do we care: Open Philanthropy tries to cost-effectively improve health and income. Migration is often considered to be one of the best ways to improve income; for instance, a person moving from a low-income country to a high-income country might raise their income by a factor of 50. We have previously made grants in both international and internal migration, and are interested in knowing whether there are underutilized migration channels whereby migrants might substantially increase their income. Our understanding is that aging populations are causing some HICs to offer more work visas than they previously offered, but that the uptake of these visas is poorly understood (and may be quite low).
• What we know: there are some international borders that do not require authorization for labor migration (e.g. within the EU, or between India and Nepal). At least one such border includes a low-income country (India/Nepal — India’s per capita GDP is over twice that of Nepal’s), but as far as we are aware, there is no database of such borders.
• Ideas for studying this: we think valuable descriptive papers could gather information on the relative usage levels of different work visas (in HICs or MICs) that could be accessible to people from LMICs, or on migration paths that don’t have caps on work visas (such as India-Nepal). Limiting to the largest HICs for ease of initial study (e.g. US, Japan, Germany, France, UK) would probably still be very valuable.
• Why we care: education may be one of the best ways to increase long-run income. However, most education studies focus only on a small number of treated students; it is less clear what the general equilibrium effects are (that is, effects across an entire city/region/nation). These are important in understanding how valuable education is in raising wages — and if Open Philanthropy should consider education interventions as a cost-effective way of improving income.
• What we know: this question has been examined in both Indonesia and India , but re-examination of these findings has made them seem less robust . In addition, we continue to be surprised that there are so few studies on how large schooling expansions affect wages.
• Ideas for studying this: one might use other large-scale expansions of schooling, such as Ghana’s free senior high school program or the Kenyan schooling expansion studied in Mbiti & Lucas (2012) .
• Why we care: we think that economic growth is likely to be very important, but it isn’t clear how best to produce higher growth rates through philanthropic funding. One idea would be to increase the supply of highly trained policymakers, who might be able to influence policy that affects many people.
• What we know: we’re not aware of work trying to measure the impact of policy training programs, such as the masters program at the Williams Center for Development Economics or the MPA ID at Harvard.
• Ideas for studying this: if you could get access to the admissions data for a program like one of the above examples, you could compare people who were nearly admitted to those who were actually admitted to see whether the programs have an effect on career trajectories. This wouldn’t prove anything directly about growth, but would provide evidence that the programs have some counterfactual effect.

Science and Metascience

• Why we care: many of Open Philanthropy’s decisions are based on social scientific work. As such, we have a vested interest in this work being reliable and replicable. Unreliable or non-replicable work might lead us to make weaker, less impactful funding decisions.
• What we know: the peer review process does not seem to weed out papers with signs of p-hacking , but pre-registration may reduce publication bias .
• Ideas for studying this: one might consider the effects of efforts like the AEA pre-analysis plan registry or the Institute for Replication .
• Why we care: we think that scientific progress is hugely important to growth and health advances. One issue in current science is that scientists spend a huge amount of time on high-stakes grant applications instead of doing science (and that the applications may be excessively long relative to what’s necessary for identifying the best science). If this is true, advocating for changes to the grantmaking process might be a high-leverage opportunity for Open Philanthropy.
• What we know: descriptive data suggests that scientists now spend a huge amount of their time applying for grants, and that spending more time on a grant application does not increase the chance of success.
• Why we care: as above, we believe scientific progress is important to growth and health advances. Therefore, we are interested in making sure scientific funding processes work as well as possible to maximize the amount of impact per federal research dollar. If there are improvements that can be made to how science is funded, Open Philanthropy might fund advocacy for such improvements.
• What we know: Carson, Graff Zivin and Shrader (2023) find that reviewers would prefer to prioritize papers with more variance in review scores, and that if this preference were taken into account it would likely lead to different projects being funded. A review of the literature suggests that peer review of applications can identify some of the most promising ideas, but the level of signal is fairly weak.
• Ideas for studying this: one might look at data on past applications and see how the set of funded projects would have differed given the use of different selection criteria, such as max score or random selection (among projects over a certain level of quality). Alternatively, one could randomize within a specific RFP (so that some proposals are selected under different criteria) or randomize across RFPs (so that you can also see how various selection criteria affect the kinds of applications received). The Institute for Progress is currently studying this in collaboration with NSF.
• Why we care: a large share of the value of academic research comes from its ultimate impact on human decisions, but ultimate decision-makers are usually not academics who are well equipped to read and understand individual academic studies. Open Philanthropy would like to know how decision-makers use academic research, and whether there might be improvements to systematic reviews such that decision-makers could be better informed.
• What we know: We know remarkably little. This study argues that academic citation networks are significantly impacted by literature reviews, and suggests that they help to organize and orient fields. This study finds that policymakers respond more to sets of studies finding the same thing across multiple settings than to individual studies – but the results are mixed.
• Ideas for studying this: we think the rollout of evidence clearinghouses is likely pseudorandom across topics, such that measuring their impact may be tractable with difference-in-difference methods. For example, one could study outcomes across different disease categories as the Cochrane collective rolled out new systematic reviews, starting when it was founded in 1993.
• Why we care: Open Philanthropy has occasionally run prize competitions to try and generate useful knowledge. See, for example, our Cause Exploration Prizes and AI Worldviews Contest . We may run more prizes in the future; as such, we would like to know how likely a prize competition is to gather useful information and how to best attract talented entrants.
• What we know: a 2010 paper argues that proportional prize contests produce more total achievement, but another paper is less prescriptive about ideal prize structure.
• Ideas for studying this: Innocentive has done a lot of prize-like competitions; they might be able to share some useful retrospective data.
• Why we care: we believe that rigorous social scientific research is key to identifying the most impactful and cost-effective interventions and policies in developing countries, some of which we may go on to fund. We are interested in knowing cost-effective ways to produce more of said research. We have funded a new IPA office previously, and might fund more such work in the future if we had more evidence about its impact on research, both overall and specific to the target country.
• What we know: Matt Clancy, who leads our grantmaking in innovation policy , coauthored an article on the extent to which research done in one place can be usefully applied in other places. Obstacles to this include different places having different underlying conditions, as well as evidence that policymakers prefer research conducted in their own countries. The article’s bibliography includes many relevant sources.
• Ideas for studying this: Getcher and Meager (2021) collected data on the openings of developing-country offices for NGOs interested in conducting research within said countries. One could use difference-in-difference design to look at how research production (and RCT production in particular) changes when a new office opens – does it cause an increase in total research in those countries? Is there evidence of substitution from non-RCTs to RCTs? Substitution from neighboring countries to the country with a new office? Do new offices tend to produce research on different topics from existing offices (e.g. focusing more on financial inclusion instead of agriculture)?
• Why we care: Open Philanthropy is often interested in influencing policy. Therefore, we want to learn about what is most likely to influence policymakers’ decision-making. We are quite uncertain what types of evidence are most likely to influence policymakers, or in what venues this evidence is likely to be presented.
• What we know: Policy documents cite a relatively small number of scientific publications. In one study, policymakers do not seem to respond to strength of evidence in deciding what to implement; in another , policymakers cared more about external validity than internal validity; in another , policymakers cared substantially about sample size.
• Ideas for studying this: what evidence do central banks (and other governmental institutions) cite most often, and how does this differ from academic citation practices? Is there additional evidence on what types of evidence best persuade policymakers or are most likely to get cited as part of regulatory decisions? E.g. how do citations from a government agency (e.g. the FTC ) compare to citations in academic work on similar topics?
• Why we care: Open Philanthropy wants to raise income levels across society. Our previous work has suggested that public spending on R&D is one of the most effective ways for governments to increase their countries’ income levels. We are thus interested in knowing how the level of public spending on R&D is set, and if there are tractable ways that Open Philanthropy might advocate for this to be increased.
• What we know: there is relatively little information available about the process of setting national-level priorities, but there is some data available about agenda-setting within NIH.
• Ideas for studying this: we aren’t sure of the best approach. Focusing on particular periods of growth in R&D spending and producing case studies might yield evidence that could be explored in a quantitative way later.

Global Development

• Why we care: Open Philanthropy makes grants in global aid advocacy and is interested in increasing both the amount and efficacy of rich countries’ foreign aid. We are interested to know how much influence agency leadership has on the distribution of aid in order to benchmark how much change we should expect over different time frames.
• What we know: we’re not aware of any work addressing this.
• Ideas for studying this: when a new Administrator is appointed, how much does the distribution of aid change across different categories? Ideally, it would be interesting to compare USAID (which is known to have many Congressional earmarks) to other countries with more flexible aid budgets.
• Why we care: we believe that sustained economic growth is one of the best ways to improve health and income. We are interested in knowing how to obtain this. Growth diagnostics are a common tool for trying to select growth-friendly policies, but we are uncertain how valuable this tool is. We are interested in knowing what additional information is gained from using growth diagnostics – how useful they are, and the extent to which this suggests that countries face common vs. distinct growth challenges.
• What we know: while there are many papers on growth diagnostics, we are not aware of any evaluation of growth diagnostics across countries.
• Ideas for studying this: taking a large body of growth diagnostics from a common source (e.g. the World Bank or Harvard Growth Lab ); using automated methods to measure the similarity of recommendations, compare how similar they are, and determine whether that similarity varies by base GDP (e.g. do similarly rich/poor countries have similar diagnostics?) or region (e.g. do Central Asian countries have similar diagnostics?).
• Why we care: many social changes — such as encouraging migration or expanding one’s moral circle to include farmed animals — are often covered in widely-viewed media channels. We are interested in knowing if such coverage changes minds.
• What we know: media seems to be able to influence decision-making (as with fertility in Brazil ). Blackfish decreased attendance at Seaworld and decreased the value of the company that owned the park.
• Ideas for studying this: we think there is more scope to study individual documentaries or shows (did Waiting for Superman affect views on education? Did Bowling for Columbine affect views on guns?). One could also conduct meta-analyses, looking across a variety of documentaries or shows to look for common effects.
• Why we care: we believe that non-competes are likely to reduce labor mobility and decrease innovation .
• What we know: there are some surveys on the prevalence of non-competes outside the US, but few are recent or comprehensive. Outside of recent work in Italy , we have little information about how prevalent non-competes are, or how harmful they are in labor markets outside the US.
• Ideas for studying this: one could gather information on the prevalence of non-competes and their effects on wages in other large labor markets, like Germany, France, and Spain.

Footnotes [+] Footnotes [−]

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Research Programme for Social Care

The NIHR Research Programme for Social Care (RPSC) call is a bi-annual competition specifically for social care proposals. 

The aim of RPSC is to fund research that generates evidence to increase the effectiveness of social care services, provides value for money and benefits people who need or use social care services, and carers. Research will cover both adults and children's social care.

RPSC replaced NIHR's Research for Social Care call (RfSC) in September 2023. The final RfSC call was Call 7. For further information about this, please see the relevant call documents .

Latest funding opportunities for Research Programme for Social Care

Research Programme for Social Care - Call 2

All social care funding opportunities

The Research Programme for Social Care encourages applications from researchers from all stages of their careers, and includes a sub stream for early career researchers as well as funding for capacity building. 

Proposals should demonstrate appropriate research expertise, and teams should have a track record of relevant published research.

RPSC invites applications from higher education institutions, charities, local authorities/governments and relevant third sector organisations in all four nations of the UK.

What do we fund?

RPSC funds research that generates evidence to improve, expand and strengthen the way social care is provided for users of care services, carers, the social care workforce, and the public across the UK. Please  read the full scope for further details.

How long and how much?

The amount awarded and the length of the funding period depends on the nature of the proposed work. Strong justification for the research duration and funding requested is required and will be considered by the reviewing committee.

RPSC also offers opportunities for early career researchers to apply for applications up to £250,000, providing they are supported by an appropriate team which is suitably resourced. These applications will be reviewed by the assessing committee but will not be in direct competition with larger awards or those from non-early career researchers.

As part of NIHR's drive to develop research capacity, RPSC is offering the opportunity to develop and advance social care research capacity building. Applicants to RPSC can include funding for research capacity development, across all stages of the academic career pathway (i.e., from internships to Masters to PhD to post-doctoral), As a general rule, it is anticipated that 10% to 20% of the overall project programme grant budget should be spent on capacity building within the grant, however each request will be reviewed on its merits. More information can be found in the capacity building guidance .

For more information, see the stage 1 finance guidance .

When is funding available?

RPSC has two researcher-led calls per year and also operates commissioned calls on priority highlight topics. See the dates for our funding competitions .

How to apply

All RPSC calls typically use a two stage application process. Please see the  applicant guidance for stage 1  and  application guidance for stage 2 to find out more.

Applicants considering submitting a stage 1 application may wish to submit an outline of their proposal for guidance before official submission. This can be done using the pre-submission form . This is not mandatory and purely aimed at helping potential applicants to engage with the requirements of the call (e.g. eligibility and remit).

Research proposals are submitted to RPSC online through the Research Management System. We supply Word document versions of the online application  Stage 1 form and Stage 2 form , to help researchers prepare their proposal ahead of submission.

Advice and support is available from the NIHR Research Support Service   to develop your research proposal.

If you are applying as a Local Authority, you can find out more information on our Local Authorities page .

If you are applying as a Charity, you can find out more information on our Charities page.

What we fund

Applications through the Research Programme for Social Care should have:

• A clear pathway to social care benefit that could be immediate or over a longer-term
• A strong link with people who need or use social care, carers and organisations which provide social care services or other relevant groups
• An appropriate team, likely consisting of social care researchers, members of the social care workforce, carers, methodologists and people who use social care, reflecting the nature of the application

We are aware that social care is broad. If you are unsure as to whether a topic is within scope for the programme, please see the call specification ,  contact the team or submit a pre-submission form . We also suggest consulting our  logic model,  to understand the intended outcomes of the programme, and consider how your topic links to this.

Our programme director

Professor Martin Knapp  is Director of the Research Programme for Social Care. 

Our funding committee

RPSC is a UK-wide programme open to applicants in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Applications are reviewed by a committee comprising social care experts, methodologists, public and practitioner members.

Committee members review all stage 1 and stage 2 applications and make funding recommendations based on the quality of applications, with support from expert peer reviewers.

The committee recommends projects for funding to the Department of Health and Social Care, which approves the projects to be funded.

Members of NIHR committees are required to declare any interests which conflict, or may be considered to conflict, with NIHR business, or may be perceived as influencing decisions made in the course of their work within NIHR programmes. All members are asked to complete the Register of Interest form (annually), which is intended to capture long term predictable interests that could be perceived to lead to conflicts of interest. These and other interests are judged on a case by case basis at individual meetings.

View our current  funding committee A and funding committee B .

NIHR registry of interests

Interested in joining one of our committees? View our committee vacancies .

We offer a wide variety of assistance during all stages of the research process. If in doubt, please get in touch. 

If you would like the team to comment briefly on your research plan please complete the presubmission form . If you have a query not answered in the above documents, please check the FAQs ,

Tel: 020 8843 8057 Email: [email protected] Our operating hours are 9am to 5pm.

For support to develop your research proposal contact the  NIHR RSS Specialist Centre for Social Care.  The RSS Specialist Centre works nationally to provide free and tailored advice to social care researchers of all levels and experience, offering a broad range of methods expertise and research support, including expert advice on public involvement and developing and delivering inclusive research that incorporates the voice of service users, carers and practitioners.  

Latest news about Social Care

NIHR-funded calculator uses NHS data to predict patients’ risk of falling

Digital training programme improves quality of life for care residents with dementia

NIHR launches £10m funding programme for social care research