Social Science Impact Accelerator: Karl Mason - Working with Discriminatory Abuse in Adult Safeguarding (£8,000)

The project embeds research findings on Discriminatory Abuse (DA) in Safeguarding Adults, which raised challenges around poor recognition of DA. National stakeholders (Local Government Association, 2020; 2024) have highlighted better practice with DA as a priority and the CQC have begun commenting on DA recording in inspections of adult social care teams, bringing it firmly onto local authority agendas across England.

The project addresses this by supporting practice with DA at three local authority sites and using knowledge exchange to develop a toolkit for addressing the challenge nationally. At local authority sites, I will work in collaboration with Principal Social Workers (the lead social work professional) and four nominated DA champions (social workers) to facilitate service-wide training, followed by bespoke knowledge exchange sessions at team level to identify change and case studies stemming from the underpinning research as well as offering insights around how DA can help in other, previously unconsidered, situations.

Messages from knowledge exchange will feed into a Practice Toolkit developed in collaboration with Research in Practice charity. The toolkit will be shared at a national launch. It will also be shared with key national stakeholders (e.g. Principal Social Workers network, Local Government Association etc).