The Home Instead Research Programme

Research Team

• Professor Bryony Beresford
• Dr Gareth O'Rourke - Home Instead Research Fellow

Project summary

Background

Homecare supports adults with social care needs to carry on living in their own home. In the UK, around 650,000 (mostly older) people use homecare and over half a million people work in the homecare sector. It's estimated that local authorities and people funding their own care spend over £4.2 billion on homecare each year. However, despite the scale and value of this aspect of social care, and the importance of homecare in the lives of so many people, it remains relatively under-researched.

Aims

The overall aim of the programme is to contribute to improving and extending the evidence-base on homecare. The programme compromises work to support Home Instead's research capacity and research readiness, and a number of substantive projects: 

• A UK multi-stakeholder consultation on research priorities for homecare for older people. This project sought, for the first time, to identify the research priorities for homecare, and scope the extent to which existing evidence maps onto these research priorities. Findings have been published and a lay summary is also available. Key audiences for this work are bodies funding social care research and the research community. 
• Understanding and supporting research readiness in homecare (Doing Research in Homecare (DRinHC) project). This project is exploring experiences of homecare providers and research teams working in the field of homecare. Findings will be used to develop a 'research toolkit for homecare' for researchers and homecare providers.
• Understanding the Home Instead Homecare Delivery model (The DeMo project). This project is developing a detailed description of the Home Instead homecare delivery model, including the ways it may differ from other homecare services. The description will be set out according to an international framework for health and social care interventions. The project will also produce a ‘theory of change’ which explains how homecare impacts client outcomes and their experiences of receiving homecare. Sources of data include documents/websites produced by Home Instead, interviews and focus groups with different staff groups within the organisation, and workshops. The project is foundational to robust comparisons of different ways of providing homecare. 

The research team are also part of a multi-institution study, which is developing a minimum dataset for homecare. 

Additional information