Centre for Care: The Transitions That Matter, 2023-2024

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 Working with care-sector partners and international teams, it responds to the urgent need for accessible evidence on care. Care systems and those who need or provide care face unprecedented pressures around quality, cost, unmet need, and workforce conditions. Care is closely linked to the NHS, labour markets, and policies on migration, welfare and housing. Cultural values, eligibility rules and shocks such as Covid-19 have contributed to fragmented provision and unequal outcomes, making reform widely recognised as necessary. The Centre produces evidence and insight for policymakers, organisations and the public. Its objectives are to: co-produce research with people who draw on care support or provide care support to improve wellbeing; publish robust evidence on care systems, inequalities and sustainability; use and develop data to inform policy and research; support PhD students and emerging scholars; inform public debate and translate research into practice; and collaborate with UK and international research teams. The Centre studies care as support, services and protections for vulnerable or disabled people, focusing on three themes: care experiences across life stages and systems; inequalities in care and their impacts across places and time; and workforce change, including recruitment, regulation and technology. Cross-cutting work explores care as a complex ecosystem, digital care and data infrastructure, enabling integrated analysis and new insights. Its multidisciplinary team, supported by global partners, works closely with care organisations and advocacy groups to deliver impactful, accessible research aimed at improving care systems and outcomes.

One of the complexities of social care is that people’s lives and their care needs change over time and are therefore in motion. People age, their health and disability status can fluctuate, and the things they want out of life can change. Care itself is a dynamic, inter-subjective process and the relationships that people have will alter over time. Therefore, the aim of this research was to understand the role of transitions across the life course in shaping people’s experiences of care, and how these could be improved.

We carried out interviews with working-age disabled people living in the community and their unpaid carer or paid care worker. The interviews aimed to explore the concept of transition, but with fluidity about how this term was interpreted. We looked at the data through the lens of care convoys. A ‘care convoy’ is a group of people travelling through life as a care network of social relations.

The research questions were:
(i) How do working-age disabled people and their carers/care workers experience and conceptualise care-related transitions?
(ii) How do the transitions influence their care relations and vice versa?
Theoretical framework and lens: the Care Convoys model.
Methods: Eight pairs of participants, consisting of a disabled person plus a carer/care worker, were interviewed (sixteen semi-structured interviews), with follow up interviews with the disabled participants after two months (twenty-four interviews in total).
Findings: A thematic analysis was carried out. Three aspects of the care convoy model cast a critical lens on participant experiences: (i) whereas the convoy model suggests progression, disabled people were often blocked in their lifecourse changes; (ii) disabled participants had small convoys even at a relatively young age; (iii) convoys were ‘decentred’, with people offering each other mutual support.