Sustainable Care: Connecting People and Systems

The Sustainable Care Research Programme is a multi-disciplinary ESRC-funded programme managed by the University of Sheffield, exploring how care arrangements, currently ‘in crisis’ in parts of the UK, can be made sustainable and deliver wellbeing outcomes. It aims to support policy and practice actors and scholars to conceptualise sustainability in care as an issue of rights, values, ethics and justice, as well as of resource distribution.

The programme’s overarching objective is to advance understanding of sources of economic and social sustainability in care, especially how wellbeing outcomes can be achieved for care users, their families and carers and paid care workers.

Led by Professor Sue Yeandle, bringing together academics from seven universities, and working with an extended network of international academic partners in fifteen other countries, the programme takes a future-oriented and internationally comparative look at current approaches to the care needs of adults living at home with chronic health problems or disabilities, examining these in the context of care systems, care work and care relationships.

Work packages:

A1 Comparing UK Care Systems: prospects, developments and differentiation in the 4 UK nations;

A2 Modelling care system costs and contributions: data for a sustainable care and wellbeing strategy;

A3 Achieving sustainability in care systems: the potential of technology;

A4 Migrant care workers in the UK: an analysis of sustainability of care at home;

B1 Delivering Care at Home: emerging models and their implications for sustainable wellbeing;

B2 Combining work and care: workplace support and its contribution to sustainable care arrangements;

B3 Technologies to support working carers: connecting people and systems;

B4 Care ‘In’ & ‘Out of’ Place: towards sustainable well-being in mobile and diverse contexts.

Centre of Migration Research is a partner in work package B4, lead by Professor Majella Kilkey and Professor Louise Ryan.

Duration

2017 - 2021

Source of funding

ESRC