IMPACT – the UK Centre for Evidence Implementation in Adult Social Care A unique partnership with ESRC and University of Birmingham to lead the way for better implementation and use of high-quality research evidence in adult social care.

Improving Adult Care Together (IMPACT)

The new IMPACT Centre will support the adult social care sector in making the best use of evidence. It will transform how social care evidence is turned into practice, including supporting adults and young people moving into adult social care and how social care interacts with partner agencies and other sectors.

It will seek to improve the uptake of evidence-based interventions in commissioning and frontline practice and build capacity among staff working in adult social care to evaluate innovations and improvements.

IMPACT stands for ‘IMProving Adult Care Together’. It is a new £15m UK centre for implementing evidence in adult social care, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, and the Health Foundation. It will be led by Professor Jon Glasby at the University of Birmingham, with a leadership team of 12 other academics, people using social care services, and policy and practice partners - along with a broader consortium of stakeholders from across the sector and across the four nations of the UK.  

What is the IMPACT Centre trying to achieve?

Key objectives for the new centre are to enable practical improvements on the ground, and make a crucial contribution to longer-term cultural change, by:

• Supporting more widespread use of evidence in adult social care, leading to better care practices, systems and outcomes for people who use services, their families and communities.
• Building capacity and skills in the adult social care workforce to work with evidence of different kinds to innovate, improve care and deliver better outcomes.
• Facilitating sustainable and productive relationships between the full range of adult social care stakeholders to co-create positive change/innovations and improve outcomes for people using adult social care and their families.
• Improving understanding of the factors which help and hinder the implementation of evidence in practice, and using this to overcome longstanding barriers to positive change.

To do this, the IMPACT Centre will collaborate with people with lived experience of adult social care services and a range of existing policy and practice partners. It will work across the UK to make sure that it is embedded in and sensitive to the very different policy contexts in each of the four nations, as well as being able to share learning across the UK as a whole.

What happens next?

The IMPACT Centre will  spend the rest of 2021 consulting with key stakeholders across adult social care, and across the four nations of the UK. 

It will then have a one-year establishment phase in which its key projects, delivery models and work programme will be refined in discussion with the sector, ready for delivery (2023-2027).

Get involved

More information can be found in the IMPACT Centre briefing document and website. If you want to find out more as the IMPACT Centre starts its work, please email impactcentre@contacts.bham.ac.uk.