ESRC Festival of Social Sciences panel event, 9 November 2017.
How to meet the social care needs of people as they get older has become a topic of increasing public interest recently, and has generated significant media attention. Many people currently experience care-giving in later years in the form of care home residence, either for a temporary respite period or permanently. Yet many media reports focus upon instances of bad care, and the anticipatory idea of moving into a care home tends to raise significant fears and worries both for the individual and their family members.
These concerns were the theme of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Sciences panel event held at The University of Manchester on 9 November. The event, held in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, looked at what academic research can say about good care-giving. The theme of this event was to investigate and discuss the behaviours and practices that comprise (or might comprise) good care-giving, and how these aspects can be promoted and sustained in care homes.
The 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science took place across the UK the week of 4-11 November with 309 events that took the social sciences to diverse and new audiences covering a range of topics from early development to dementia.
The Employee Gentleness project involves two ethnographic case studies of employee gentleness - one in a palliative care setting and another in a social care setting.