Unmasking Social Care Inequalities: Using Routine Data to Enable Reablement Equity

In this study, we want to find and discuss inequalities in adult social care reablement services in Manchester. These services are important for helping people get back their independence after leaving hospital or when needs change. Reablement is temporary, usually provided at home, helping people to learn or re-learn everyday tasks, like cooking meals and washing.

People access and use reablement services in different ways. These can lead to uneven outcomes, especially for people in marginalised groups. Studies have found differences in how care is done, with mixed findings, making it hard to find clear solutions.

Working with Manchester City Council, we will use routine information from social care records to better understand how well reablement services are working. We will look at Information about people using the service from 2020 to 2024, including when they started and ended getting help and how much help they got.

We will have information about people’s health, age, gender, the care they already get, why they need help, how poor the area in which they live is, and so on. We will analyse this data to see how various parts of Manchester differ, what makes it harder for people to access these services, and what shows reablement as working well. We will answer these questions:
• Are all parts of Manchester getting the same help from reablement, or is it different in some places?
• Can everyone who needs reablement get it, or are there things making it harder for some people?
• After people get help, do some things, like where they live or their background, make it easier or harder for them to live without help from others?

This work will help us to understand patterns and trends in reablement services more clearly and how we can improve them. This will allow us to gather valuable feedback and insights, helping to improve the services offered by local authorities and how they plan them. Public involvement is a key part of this study, and we will do it in partnership with Shaping Our Lives (SOL), a user-led organisation experienced in involving people who access social care in research. We will look at different user views and experiences with a user advisory board. We will have one-to-one sessions with each board member to offer support and make sure everyone feels confident about their overall understanding and direct contributions towards the work we do together.

We will share findings to increase the impact of the study, making sure that what we share is accessible, relevant, and applicable to everyone. We will use resources everyone can access, research papers, third-sector networks, and collaborate with relevant social care and public service information networks nationally and locally.