The Covid-19 pandemic has had enormous impacts on people who use and provide long-term care in England, in terms of mortality, mental and physical health, and financial impacts on care provider.

This project will generate learning from scientific evidence and relevant experiences of other countries in relation to Covid-19 in the social care sector, in order to inform policies to improve the resilience of the social care sector in England and support its recovery. We will do this through:

• Co-development of a framework to provide strategic direction for how the social care sector (including residential and community settings, and provided by paid and unpaid carers) in England can recover from, and be more resilient to future pandemics and shocks;
• Synthesis of international evidence and lessons relevant to the English social care sector;
• Informing development of policies to improve the resilience of the sector to future pandemics and shocks and to support recovery.

Methods:

1. We will carry out a Situational Analysis, consisting of a structured desk review and stakeholder interviews, covering the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on people who use and provide social care in England, of the policy and practice responses to mitigate those impacts, and the factors that supported or hindered the implementation of policies in England. We will use this situational analysis, as well as a Theory of Change (ToC) workshop with key stakeholders, to establish a framework from which to assess the relevance of international experiences and evidence to the social care system in England.
2. We will then carry out evidence reviews to map and synthesize empirical evidence on the effectiveness of key policy and practice measures to prevent and mitigate the impact of the pandemic and barriers and facilitators of implementation of those measures.
3. We will use a case study approach, including document analysis and interviews, to review in detail the experiences and learnings from 4 countries, from the perspective of relevance to the English social care system.
4. Finally, we will apply the framework developed through ToC to synthesize findings from these workstreams.

The project started in January 2021 and will end in June 2022, we expect the first interim outputs around April 2021.

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