Success

One local authority has approved the application and challenge now is to seek permission and involvement from team managers. Here’s hoping managers and then team members will feel able to participate if they want to- even on top of their existing commitments and pressures..

Disappointment

Of course I knew that going through the ethics and governance procedures in order to be able to even begin to agree research practices and procedures would take a long time and a lot of effort all round.  I have been working on this now for 10 months and had ups and down. A big down was when one local authority which we’d been though all ethics and governance procedures with and had been approved and about to start planning the next stage- inviting volunteers to participate- decided to pull out. All completely understandable- too many pressures on the authority, social workers overloaded with work- increasing number of cases and reduction of staffing- and the idea of even one additional commitment- however small (and ours is really a big ask) just too much. They were very interested in being involved- but just could not. What a shame! Sometimes feels like this is the worst time in the past 50 years to attempt to do this research with the cuts to public services, local authorities under pressure- and feel bad about suggesting additional work for anyone…