Author: Stuart Muirhead

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

PROP2 is reaching its conclusion and we have an event on in Edinburgh to hear the presentations from all the practitioners and the exciting research projects they have been working on. See the invite above for details. If you would like to attend do contact crfr.events@ed.ac.uk to register your interest. Places are limited.

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…

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