Last week, to a meeting about strategy for social work research in healthcare; as we’re coming up to the next election, the social work ‘knowledge’ bodies are looking at how they can get more money for research. Several people speak about various projects, and I make a case for stronger support for audit and evaluation by practitioners as part of a coherent agency structure, and a national clearing house for useful data that results. I think wqe ought to create a body that sets topics that practitioners and agencies could research across the country, and then collating the data. Over a few years, we could massively improve the data available about social work and projects.

The whole advantage of audit as part of research is that it is really practice-informed. So much research is done by academics to their own or government agendas, and does not engage with anyone. That is why we have to have organisations like RIP (Research in Practice) http://www.rip.org.uk/ and RIPFA (Research in Practice for Adults) http://www.ripfa.org.uk that market research to practitioners.

Audit is widely used in healthcare, but less in social care, and has the capacity to engage people and produce useful data.