This blog is an introduction to an upcoming series of blogs. We wanted to shared some of the really interesting findings with you that we have so far. We are half way through data collection so thought now would be a good time to share these and give you an update and re-cap on the project behind Making Positive Moves.
Thanks for coming to the Making Positive Moves website! This blog is an introduction to an upcoming series of blogs – we are halfway through data collection and analysis for the Making Positive Moves research project, and have some really interesting findings to share with you. We therefore thought it would be useful to begin by re-introducing ourselves and our project, to set the context of the upcoming results.
We at the Making Positive Moves team want to help people with learning disabilities to live their best lives, in their best home, and are using research to help us find out more about the evidence base for this. We have a series of research projects on the go, the main one being our NIHR funded study – these are the results we plan to tell you more about.
This large study started in late 2020, when we began recruiting participants who had moved as part of the Transforming Care programme. This has been the NHS England plan to move people with learning disabilities out into their own homes in the community from inappropriate hospital settings, and was a reaction to the abusive practices at Winterbourne View.
We have been speaking to people across England who have moved out of an assessment and treatment unit / psychiatric or mental health hospital / forensic unit. To be eligible to participate, people had to have been living in their new home for at least 6 months, so they could tell us more about the things that had been helping them to stay out of hospital – as well as what factors were more of an issue, and made readmission more likely. We’re speaking with everyone four times. They initially have two interviews at the first time point, to give them plenty of time and space to tell us about their lives. We then go back at least one year later, and have two more interviews This process is enabling us to see some of the things that have changed over time. For example, has their support package changed; are there different staff now and what has the impact of that been; do they feel they are making progress or staying the same – and is that what they want?
Far from clinical data on numbers of people who have moved, we have been getting the real, human, lived experience stories of those going through the process of making a new life for themselves, sometimes after years in hospital.
We’re currently in the middle of our round of follow-up interviews with all our participants, and have been analysing the interviews from the first round. We have been using Grounded Theory to analyse the data, which means we’ve been studying what people tell us to look at how they make sense of their experiences.
We’re still going with the analysis, so don’t have the final results to share yet. However, we are keen to share some of the early findings. We’ll be sharing these over the coming weeks, so watch this space!
And if you can make it, we will also be sharing some of these findings at our stakeholder event on Thursday 4th May 2023 – email hello@makingpositivemoves.org or visit us on social media for more details.
