How the project reached out to people

Liverpool Social Care Partnership contacted people who use support services, family carers, care and support providers and organisations who are in touch with people who draw on services.

This included care organisations, advocacy organisations, Age Concern, Citizens Advice and local Healthwatch organisations.

Around 60 organisations shared a questionnaire with their contacts. (See the Appendix at the end of this report for more information.)

Three organisations gave extra help:

• A charity supporting people with brain injury allowed researchers to meet people who use their services and family members and complete the questionnaire with them.
• A charity running local keep fit classes for older people invited researchers to attend and complete the questionnaire.
• Journey Enterprises, a charity which supports people with learning disabilities in the North East, organised four meetings between the researchers and people supported by the charity. It also encouraged people to complete an easy read version of the questionnaire.

The questionnaire

Altogether, 52 standard questionnaires were completed. In addition, over 60 easy read versions of the questionnaire were also completed.

All of the questions had YES/NO answers. However, some people answered with a sentence, rather than just a YES or a NO. Where that happened, the project looked at what had been written and worked out, as far as possible, whether the answer should be counted as a YES or a NO.

Of the 52 people who completed the standard questionnaire:

• 29 (56%) were people who use care services
• 23 (44%) were family carers
• 28 identified as female
• 23 identified as male
• 1 preferred not to select a gender.

Of the 29 people who draw on care services:

• 18 were aged over 65
• 11 were between 18 and 64.

Discussion groups and workshops

The project also wanted to talk in more detail to some groups of people. It therefore:

• held three focus groups, giving people the chance to talk about things in more detail. (This included older people and some younger adults.)
• arranged for some people to come to a training session on data protection and cyber security, and it used the training session as a chance for some more discussion. (This included older people, people with sensory impairment.)
• held four meetings with groups of the people supported by Journey Enterprises. (This included people with learning disabilities.)

Some of these discussion groups and workshops were online using video conferencing, and some were face-to-face.

Interpreters were arranged where needed. This included BSL interpreters and several foreign language interpreters. Some of the meetings used Makaton, which can help communication with some people with learning disabilities.

Altogether, around 100 people came to these discussion groups and workshops.