Who Gets Care?

SCIE has co-produced a working definition of equity in social care, inspired by the World Health Organisation’s definition of health equity, which reads: 

“Equity in social care means the absence of unfair, avoidable, or remediable differences in access to, experience of, or outcomes from care and support among groups of people – whether defined by social, economic, demographic, or geographic factors, or by characteristics such as sex, gender, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation.” 

In our online conference and other activities, we’ll be exploring a range of approaches that aim to further the cause of equity, and we’ll be highlighting projects that are challenging unfair, avoidable and remediable differences by the work they’re undertaking in the real world. We’ll be facilitating conversations and providing opportunities to learn from people with lived experience and practitioners in the field. We want to inspire people to make a difference in the communities they are part of. 

I’m pleased with what we came up with as a title in the end. ‘Who Gets Care?’ not only raises questions about accessibility, but it also has the meaning of who understands what we mean by care – what it means to the people who access care and support, to unpaid carers, service providers and policymakers. It’s likely that there will be different understandings, differences in emphasis, and differing priorities. But I’m sure there will also be key issues that impact on everyone, and something we’ll be able to do is identify the ways in which co-production is essential in addressing these issues. 

One of the titles we considered for the week was ‘Is Care Fair?’  We decided not to go for that, because it’s been established that the answer to the question is ‘no’. Apparently, we’re living in a world in which everyone knows that care isn’t fair, which raises the question of what we’re going to do about it. Co-production Week will play its part in helping us to rise to the challenge of that question, and show how SCIE can help support you in answering it. If you meanwhile want our support to help improve your co-production approach, or just a chat about it, do contact consultancy@scie.org.uk.