Peer supported adult social care in prisons in England and Wales

Seminar details

Title: Peer supported social care in prisons in England and Wales

Date: Tuesday 17th December 2024

Time: 13:00-14:00 (UK time)

Registration

Please register via this link: Eventbrite

Abstract

In some prisons, prisoners (‘buddies’) are trained to provide social care support to other prisoners. These services are not mandated but have been proposed as a solution to overcome issues such as workforce shortages and gaps in support in prisons. There has been little research evaluating the effectiveness, implementation, and experience of social care peer support in prison, or how best to measure the impact and cost of such schemes for social care in England and Wales.

The NIHR funded Rapid Service Evaluation Team conducted a rapid mixed-methods study to evaluate peer support schemes for adult social care in prisons in England and Wales, and covered their implementation, experiences of staff and prisoners, risks and benefits, and an assessment of how to measure the impact and cost of these services.

This talk will focus on the methods used and findings from the qualitative workstream, which focused on evaluating implementation of peer supported social care in prisons, staff and prisoner experience and risks and benefits.

Speaker biography

Dr Holly Walton is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Behavioural Science and Health (Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care) at UCL. Holly’s research interests include implementation of, and experience with complex interventions and health and social care services, and methods used to evaluate implementation, patient and staff experience of healthcare services. Holly works on a range of health and social care evaluations which use rapid and traditional methods.