Full practitioner research reports available for download!

We are very pleased to showcase six of the full PROP2 practitioner-research reports.  They can be downloaded, along with the summary postcards, through the individual practitioner profiles on this blog.

Direct links to the reports are available here:

Raymond Brennan – With a little help from my friends: The ‘Circle of Friends’ approach

Geraldine Ditta – Resilience and wellbeing in people living with dementia in relation to perceived attitudes in their communities

Elaine Monteith – What helps women who have learning disabilities get checked for cervical cancer?

Iain Houston – ‘I’ve been thinking’: How does completing life story work affect people with dementia?

Alan Gilmour – How do we ensure that training and information support contributes to positive outcomes for carers?

Sarah Duff – Can yoga create calm in people with dementia?

The next steps….

We will now be meeting up with all the practitioners individually (as well as a whole range of our partners and supporters who made these projects possible) to evaluate and discuss how people found the process of taking part in and delivering PROP2. Even more importantly than that, we will be chatting to all the practitioners about the ways in which they have been implementing some of the findings from their research and how this has influenced their work. We’ll hopefully be ready to report on some of that and share our reflections just into the new year.

Stuart

Congratulations!!!

We had the final PROP2 event at the John McIntyre Conference Centre on the 21st July. There were nine highly insightful presentations from the practitioner researchers which really highlighted the variety of projects that were undertaken.

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Catherine-Rose getting the day started for us

The day was kicked off by Catherine-Rose Stocks-Rankin, passing on some of her knowledge from the original PROP project and outlining the value of practitioner research in general. This was on the back of her and fellow authors winning an outstanding paper award from their previous work – see here to check it out. We then went straight into our presentations for the day. We will be getting the audio from the presentations up here soon.

The presentations were followed by group discussions on practitioner research, how we can tackle some of the challenges that were highlighted from the presentations, and how we can spread the learning and influence of this type of work.

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Group discussions

At the end of the day we asked three evaluation questions and received a whole range of responses. Here is a selection:

1) What is your take home message from today?

  • Partnership research is accessible to all and for all to get involved
  • Hearing the research in other areas to improve things for carers and the community
  • We can change the world with research ‘one wee bit at a time’

2) What’s been the most useful aspect of the day?

  • Hearing of individual experiences. Having the fact relationships matter reiterated
  • Listening to the practitioners getting validation of their own experience, skills and knowledge
  • Really enjoyed hearing the presentations and getting practical ideas to improve practice

3) Anything else you would have liked to have seen?

  • Info on PROP3!
  • Maybe some of the people involved on video or in person
  • Wider audience

Some of the messages were extremely positive and the audience seemed very impressed with the breadth of areas researched by the practitioners. Part of this was because of the focus on ‘what happens now?’ – this is very much at the heart of why the practitioners became involved in this project and it was clear that across all the presentations there was a focus on how the research was going to be spread and used.

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Group shot of all the practitioner-researchers

Over the next few months I will be following up with all the practitioners to see how their research has influenced their work and beyond. The presentations may done and the final reports written, but there is a lot of valuable work still to be done!

Well done to everyone for getting through what has been a brilliant (and tough!) year.

Final training day done

We have just finished our final training day in our great library location at Edinburgh Uni. I think we’ll all miss the tranquil views of the Meadows outside the windows… view

It has been a long road for all the practitioners since the project started way back on the 6th August 2014. We spent our final day going over the report write up and making plans for how everyone was looking to communicate their messages to colleagues (and beyond) and how they were planning on putting some of their research and recommendations into practice.

We also collected some thoughts of how the journey has been for everyone. We started off with 14 practitioners taking part, and due to various work and life circumstances we are down to 10. Credit has to go to all those who have managed to stick with the journey – it is no mean feat to balance extremely busy work lives (magnified by the current levels of change in many areas of social care) and the writing/thinking/reviewing demands of a research project like this.

I have had sneak peeks into what all the projects have been looking at and have high hopes for the great work not only contributing to the knowledge and evidence base of the research community, but also making a difference to the people that use the services of the organisations taking part. After the end of the projects, I will be following up with the practitioners/projects for a while to see just what types of impact they are making, with a shiny report to follow at the end of this year.

Next up will be our final event on the 21st July… details to follow in a couple of months.

Cheers,

Stuart

Welcome to the first PROP2 blog!

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PROP2 has now been well under way since August 2014 and all the practitioner-researchers have been working hard to design a proposal and start conducting research in and around their places of work. This year we have twelve practitioners from across seven organisations taking part (please see here for more details and have a look at the wide range of areas they are researching).Picture2

We are at the stage where proposals and ethics clearance has now been submitted and everyone is busily getting on with their own research.The next stages (through February and March) will be in analysing and interpreting the data, ready to write-up for the summer.

So far we have had a range of speakers at our five training events (see here for more information). We have been lucky to have speakers from Edinburgh and Dundee universities, and to have a range contributors from across the social and public services sector in Scotland.

In addition to this, nine of the thirteen practitioners are taking part in a Qualitative Analysis and Information CPD module at the University of Edinburgh (see here for details). This is an opportunity to gain 20 credits within the MSc in Integrated Service Improvement: Health and Social Care course and contribute to personal CPD for those that are interested. This will link in with and complement the overall PROP2 course. There will be three individual days of training through January, February and March, with exercises to be carried out across these days and at the end.

Our most recent Training Day was on the 22nd January so it’s a busy start to the year for everyone! There will be updates on this site as we go and materials posted up here as all the researchers progress with their work.

If you have any questions about the overall PROP2 project then please feel free to contact me on stuart.muirhead@iriss.org.uk. Individual project contact details can be found on the Practitioner-Researcher pages.

302000_10150805060865650_95646521_n   Stuart Muirhead