PEPE 23 Jan 2008 Making a framework for good practice in social care Patricia Kearney, SCIE Karen Jones, University of the West of England Mike Fisher, SCIE

Agenda  SCIE’s task in defining good practice  Working with practitioners to define good practice  Is good practice evidence-based practice?  Your views?

About SCIE  Launched in 2001 by Government, SCIE develops and promotes knowledge about good practice in social care  Works in partnership  Products and services are free  Draws on and analyses knowledge from a range of sources

Sources of knowledge A KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR SOCIAL CARE Policy Organisational knowledge User knowledge Practitioner knowledge Research

What we have learned…  Dissemination has to lead to implementation and evaluation  SCIE is small and has no remit within service organisations  Our impact is greatest where we meet fertile ground  The sector’s knowledge management capacity is low

Status of Social Care  Government has asked SCIE to lead the sector on developing the status of social care, including the answer to ‘what is good practice?’  An opportunity to increase and sustain the sector’s KM capacity  Good practice framework for use by the sector  Developed by SCIE through consensus building and testing within and across some key organisations

We want the project to…  Develop consensus across the sector about good practice  Use examples from key stake-holder’s practice to illustrate the framework and show how organisations with different remits will use it  Have practice experience, and its description, as central

Critical Best Practice: key themes  Getting away from a ‘deficit culture’ (Ferguson, 2003) in social work  Profiling best practice through stakeholder narratives  Application of critical analysis to good practice

Working together to create practice narratives  Academics and practitioners working together  Key principles: - avoiding deficit talk and seeking out ‘best’ - using detailed narratives of practice - focus on process - application of critical sociological analysis

Drawing out ‘best’  The challenge of articulating ‘best’  The challenge of articulating underpinning knowledge  The value of a deductive approach

Some final thoughts on ‘best’ (1)  Critical best practice refers to social work which is skilfully supportive, therapeutic and challenging of power structures, yet authoritative and which can be shown to deserve to be called the ‘best’ because it contains aspects of all these. (Jones et al, 2008)

Some final thoughts on ‘best’ (2)  Embraces complexity and ethical dilemmas  Importance of opportunities to articulate good practice and practice knowledge  Importance of stakeholder ‘voice’

Is good practice EBP?  practice that is effective in achieving the services stakeholders want, at a price they are willing to afford  economic evaluation?  processes that are accessible and acceptable to users, and feasible in daily practice  outcomes that stakeholders want

EBP definition: example

An absence of evidence  investment in social care research is low  many areas lack outcomes-based evidence  research runs 2+ years behind practice  publication lead times are often 18 months

Innovation-based evidence?  can we derive evidence more urgently from practice innovation?  ‘new’ in social care, new to the locality, requiring new arrangements  criteria  processes  outcomes  rationale  feasibility

Innovation Based Evidence (IBE)  descriptive scale using all four criteria (process, outcomes, rationale, feasibility)  taking account of  reporting success rather than failure  local versus national  partial evidence (missing dimensions)  biased evidence (e.g champions, baselines)  short- versus long-term, durable outcomes

Summary  SCIE’s task in defining good practice  Working with practitioners to define good practice  Is good practice evidence-based practice?  Your views?