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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Time for some home truths
— exploring the relationship between GPs and social workers | | Author(s) | Catherine Mangan, Robin Miller, Jeremy Cooper |
| Journal title | Journal of Integrated Care, vol 22, no 2, 2014 |
| Publisher | Emerald, 2014 |
| Pages | pp 51-61 |
| Source | www.emeraldinsight.com/jica.htm |
| Keywords | General practitioners ; Social workers ; Interaction [welfare services] ; Coordination ; Projects ; Case studies ; Evaluation. |
| Annotation | The purpose of this paper was to explore the relationship between general practitioners (GPs) and social care professionals by reflecting on a project which sought to improve joint working between general practice and social care though an action research process. The project, known as Home Truths and developed by iMPOWER Consulting, involved gathering local data regarding joint working in local areas and using this data as a catalyst for change. The Institute of Local Government Studies and the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham were asked to act as a critical friend to the project. This involved supporting the design of the data collection, offering advice on the process and carrying out a short evaluation of the impact of the first wave. This paper reflects on the collected data from the sites and information from the impact evaluation. The study highlights the poor quality of the relationship between GPs and social workers. Findings that illustrate this include GPs' poor knowledge of social care services; a perception that social care services were of poor quality and rating the quality of their relationships with social workers as poor. However GPs felt that knowing more about social care could help prevent their patients going into residential care earlier than necessary and wanted to work more closely with social care to exploit the benefits and opportunities. The interventions that have been put in place to try and improve relationships focus on the day-to-day working lives of the professionals rather than attempting to introduce new initiatives. The response rate from GPs in the areas was found to be low (average response rate was 10 per cent in each area) and it may be that only those GPs who were interested in working with social care responded. The initiatives that have been developed appear to be reasonable responses to the issues identified. However, a lack of discrete outcomes through which to measure improvement will make it difficult to demonstrate the impact of the interventions. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150522273 A |
| Classmark | QT6: QR: QK6: QAJ: 3E: 69P: 4C |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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