This fully funded PhD (beginning October 2021) is part of a collaboration between social scientists from King's College London and Shaping Our Lives – a national organisation led by and for Disabled people and/or service users. We are working together to create new services that make it easier for Disabled people and people who use health and social care services to be involved when health and social care services are being designed, researched, and improved.
Shaping Our Lives recently secured £197,450 from the National Lottery Community Fund to develop and implement two new services in a 4 year project called The Inclusive Involvement Movement. The services comprise: (1) My Involvement Profile, an involvement tool that will support service users to detail their lived experience and self-advocate for their inclusive involvement, and (2) Involvement Champions, offering training and support to service users to implement a simple but effective involvement framework with local decision-makers that supports a national standard of meaningful involvement. These services will make it easier for Disabled people and people who use health and social care services to be involved when health and social care services are being designed, researched and improved so that their voices are heard and make a difference.
The lottery funding also creates an opportunity for Shaping Our Lives to develop longer-term partnerships with research teams, funders and other public organisations, with the goal of influencing public policy and services to ensure it is better informed by and created in collaboration with people who are marginalised in existing societal and institutional structures. This studentship is part of this partnership. During the years 2022-2024, this doctoral research project will study how these services are co-designed and then how people use them in different places around the country. The findings from the study will be used to create new, easy to use resources to support other organisations to use this new way of working together so that they can work more effectively and inclusively.
The services are being developed and co-designed following user-led principles and these will be compared to an approach to working in groups based on the Nobel Prize-winning work of social scientist Elinor Ostrom. She studied how groups around the world managed local public resources (for example, forests) and found that groups tend to work best when they follow 8 principles. The principles relate to such things as: identifying what needs to be done and who is going to do it; ensuring everyone is making a fair contribution; and how to resolve conflicts. These seem like common sense but often groups do not do them all naturally and are less effective because of this. The principles are untested against user-led co-production principles and also in a partnership between service users and researchers. Together we will investigate the similarities between Ostrom's principles and a user-led approach to co-production; and if using these principles is relevant to a best practice model of co-production, leading to better services for Disabled people and other people who use health and social care services.
Once the new services have been created, this project will study who uses them, why they use them and how they use them. It will focus on four local areas in the UK where the services are going to be used. The doctoral student will take part in key meetings and observe what happens as well as interviewing the people who are designing the new services and those who are using them. We are particularly interested in what happens in the long term. So, key questions to be answered are: does this new way of developing services make services better and fairer and, if so, why and for how long?
Funding
Students will receive a stipend of £17,285 per annum and their fees are paid. Additional funding for research costs of around £750 per annum is also available.
Study options: The studentship includes funding for either a 1+3 studentship (1-year Masters degree followed by a 3-year PhD) or a +3 studentship (3-year PhD). This studentship is offered ideally as a +3 and full-time studentship given the timetable of the initiative which will be the subject of the doctoral study.
Please see information on the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership website to help you decide whether to apply for a +3 or 1+3 studentship.
International (including EU) applicants: please note that the funder will only pay the Home fee which means that the difference between the home and international fee must be found elsewhere (from an institutional, partner or student contribution or an institutional fee waiver). In the case of this studentship, fee waivers are available for LISS DTP students from the Centre for Doctoral Studies at King’s College London.
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