Social Policy and Practice

The Centre for Policy on Ageing has formed a consortium with four other information providers to create the 'Social Policy and Practice' database. This database provides a wide-ranging source of information on Social Policy and Practice, both in the UK and internationally.

• A comprehensive database of evidence based practice
• Abstracts from thousands of journals, books and research reports
• Topics include: children and young people, families and parenting, older people, community health, homelessness, disability and special needs, social work, crime, and equalities

For further information see the Social Policy and Practice website.

The continuing information problem

"For many practitioners working in the field of social care or social work access to information is a continuing problem. Work time is dominated by heavy caseloads and there often is a lack of awareness of, and access to, information resources. As a result the practitioner often falls back on the 'quick and dirty' search on Google and is then faced with vast amounts of information, much of it not validated. Yet enormous benefits could be gained from using specialist bibliographic databases covering social policy and practice to find existing research and practice evidence.

To address this issue staff at the Centre were actively involved in facilitating the grouping of these UK specialist database producers through a major database vendor."

Alan Gomersall, Centre for Evidence & Policy, King's College, London

See notes of a recent presentation by Alan