Community Based Support - Research and Evidence Review

Ageing Better has established a strategic partnership with Leeds City Council and Leeds Older People's Forum, working together across a range of topics. Leeds is committed to becoming a great place to grow old in, and we believe that one of the contributors to this ambition is their ability to build on an existing resource - the Leeds Neighbourhood Network (LNN). Both we and stakeholders in Leeds believe the LNN is a good example of an asset based preventative and community led approach.

We anticipate that models of community-based support like the LNN can contribute to individual outcomes (e.g. social connections and health), neighbourhood outcomes (e.g. social capital and inclusive communities) and system level outcomes (e.g. health and care system). But, to date there is very little evidence about the LNN. The only evidence we have found is an initial Cost Benefit Analysis by Nuffield Trust, some small-scale research by IPPR/Gulbenkian in 2014 and a case study by SCIE in a report on strength based social work and the 2014 Care act.

Ageing Better wishes to contribute to and build upon the existing evidence base on forms of community-based support for older people, and we are currently scoping out a major evaluation of the LNN. We have already completed an initial scoping of this work (during May - September 2018) and during this time we established a local steering group for the evaluation, gained a good understanding of the network, the variety of models and approaches across the network, the range of individual, social and system wide outcomes it seeks to influence, and agreed five sets of evaluation questions to address through the evaluation. As a result, we have a broad architecture for a theory-based evaluation that we are looking to commission in 2019.

To inform the development of our evaluation of LNN we are commissioning this research project, which will provide us with a better understanding of the policy, practice and funding context along with an understanding of the existing evidence for community approaches like the LNN and the interventions that comprise what they offer. The work to be undertaken in the current ITT is intended to provide firm foundations for a theory-based evaluation - providing us with an understanding of the existing evidence base and the wider policy and practice landscape.