What is CHARM (the Care Home Action Researcher in residence Model)?
Speakers:
Bio: Isabelle Latham is a Senior Lecturer at the Association for Dementia Studies at the University of Worcester having joined in 2011 as a Research Associate. Isabelle combines an active research role, leading the department's care home research with delivery of education programmes, enjoying the translation of research findings into practical skills and knowledge for frontline staff. Isabelle is particularly passionate about frontline care of people living with dementia and developing the skills and passion of frontline staff. This stems from her early career as a care worker with older people living in care homes and in the community. Isabelle has over 25 years’ experience of working in health and social care settings with a particular focus on safeguarding vulnerable adults from abuse and educating frontline care staff.
Faith Frost, University of Worcester
It is known that traditional approaches to engaging care homes in research experience substantial challenges. This project encouraged collaboration between care homes and researchers to explore alternative models of engagement and improve outcomes. CHARM used 2 experienced researchers embedded within 4 care homes to build in-house research expertise and support the design and delivery of bespoke research projects of use to the whole care home community. Action-research was used as the methodology because of its participatory; flexible; context-specific and improvement-oriented focus. This introductory talk will explore how to research collaboratively with care homes by sharing the findings from the CHARM study: (1) the impact of CHARM on the care homes and staff who took part; (2) the refined model; (3) facilitators and barriers to successful implementation and (4) recommendations for future rollout of the model. This talk will include video contributions from care home personnel who took part.