We aim to empower social care staff (including social workers) and community / voluntary organisation workers by measuring and visually showing trends in resilience, resistance, and burnout. Our goal is to amplify workers’ voices to ensure the right information is available to inform decision-making and drive actions that improve outcomes for workers and the people they serve.
Background
The pandemic has had a major impact on social care and community/voluntary workers and their organisations in the UK. These groups are vital to communities and society, and their staff face tough challenges while providing support to vulnerable people - often going far beyond their usual job duties. For example, library workers now help visitors not only with books but also with long-term needs like mental health, housing, and jobs. Even before COVID-19, these organisations were already stretched to their limits.
The ongoing need for crisis management, alongside usual services, has made it harder for workers to remain resilient and for services to stay sustainable. Social care staff report some of the highest stress levels in the UK. Their ability to 'bounce back’ in the face of adversity and work-related quality of life dropped significantly during the pandemic. Efforts to reduce burnout have often been short-term and not very effective.
Project Aims
The project has three main aims:
- To empower staff and organisations by ensuring their voices are heard and their experiences inform policy and practice.
- To create a visual tool that shows trends in frontline resilience, resistance, and burnout in two regions.
- To design an evaluation framework that presents the possible impact of these trends on workers and those they serve, including service delivery and continuity.
Project Activity
- Scoping review of resilience, resistance, and burnout among social care professionals and community organisation staff, including an economic health analysis.
- Development of visual dashboards that use online group posts to show real-time ‘big picture’ trends in resilience, resistance, and burnout, alongside an analysis of how these trends may affect frontline workers and those they serve. Our secure system collects posts from participating groups and creates simple graphs to help frontline workers, managers, policymakers, and other groups understand and respond to the needs of social care staff and community/voluntary organisation frontline workers in Greater London or the East of England.
- Online survey for social care and community/ voluntary organisation staff
- Focus groups and interviews with social care and community/ voluntary organisation staff to ensure the dashboard is user-friendly and includes the information people need.
- Public and Practitioner Involvement and Engagement, including experience and knowledge sharing with stakeholders.
Who can contribute or participate and how?
Frontline social care staff and community workers and volunteers (18 years+, based in Greater London or the East of England):
- continue posting on your social media group
- complete anonymous survey
- participate in focus groups or one-to-one interviews with research team
All forms of participation will help ensure findings reflect real frontline realities.
Administrators of social media groups (groups with 18 years+ social care/community workers in London/East England):
- Facilitate researcher access (discuss with project team, if comfortable provide consent).
- Discuss any concerns with the project team.
- Share project updates with your group.
Care service managers and commissioners: use insights from visual trends to listen to, support, and collaborate with frontline workers, and share feedback with project team.
Practitioners, policy makers, funders, researchers: engage with project team about findings and co-design next steps.
We are committed to including staff, volunteers and participants regardless of age, disability, gender, marital or partnership status, sex, religious affiliation or beliefs, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and under-researched and under-represented groups due to inequalities of any kind.
Privacy, ethics, and participation
- No identifying information (e.g., names, places, mobile numbers, images, IP addresses) will be collected or at any point visible to researchers. All data will be anonymised before researchers see it.
- Participation is voluntary; withdrawal can occur at any time without consequence.
- The study has been reviewed by the Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee and is fully insured.
- Participation will contribute toward developing support strategies for frontline workers, increasing public awareness and informing policy.
Anticipated or actual outputs
- Example visualisation of real time and predictive trends in resilience, resistance and burnout among social care and community organisation frontline workers with an integrated example visualisation of impacts on workers and those they serve.
- Sharing of findings with all participants, stakeholders and more widely.
Who is involved?
Project team
Leads
- Dr Eolene Boyd, PI/Co-Lead, University of Cambridge
- Dr Michela Tinelli, Co-Lead, Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Team
- Dr Henry Musto, University of Cambridge
- Andy Cowan, University of Cambridge
- Dr Calum Mattocks, University of Cambridge
- Dr Liam Saddington, University of Cambridge
- Doris Mutsando, University of Cambridge
- Ndai Nyamazazare, University of Cambridge
- Dr Jacqueline Damant, CPEC, the LSE
Advisory group (in-kind):
- Professor Jagdip Singh, Case Western Reserve University, USA
- Professor Fei Guo, Macquarie University, Australia
- Professor Chris Baumann, Macquarie University, Australia
- Dr Daniel Robins, University of Oxford
- Dr Jonathan Goodman, University of Cambridge
- Professor David Stilwell, University of Cambridge
- Dr Angelique Mavrodaris, UK Health Security Agency; University of Cambridge
- Dr Muzaffer Kaser, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Trust; University of Cambridge
Contact
Katia Asfalto, ka561@medschl.cam.ac.uk
Eolene Boyd, emb43@medschl.cam.ac.uk
This project is funded by the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR209616T Programme Development grant)
