The ExChange Wales Podcast: Trailer

Welcome to the ExChange Wales Podcast! 

In this trailer episode, hosts Martin Elliott and Jeremy Dixon introduce themselves as the hosts for the new season of the ExChange Wales podcast. 

Find out more about ExChange Wales on our website and sign up to future events: https://www.exchangewales.org/

Transcript

INTRO
Welcome to the Exchange Wales Podcast, a series that explores research and practice sharing, evidence and care experience to build better social care in Wales and beyond.

MARTIN
Hello and welcome to this introduction to the new Exchange podcast series with me, Martin Elliott, and I'm joined by Jeremy Dixon. We're going to use this short podcast today just to introduce ourselves, to introduce Exchange, and to tell you all a little bit about our planned series of regular podcasts. We're going to start by, as I say, introducing ourselves.

So, I'm going to ask Jeremy a couple of questions. So if you want to just say who you are and what your background is and, how you’ve come to be where you are now.

JEREMY
Sure. So my name is Jeremy Dixon. I'm based at the Centre of Adult Social Care Research, and I'm currently a Reader, which is a type of academic post.

And I guess I've had, quite a long time where I've been involved in social work, either as a academic or as a practitioner. So I qualified in 1998 at York University, and I started off, doing community mental health work. I'd worked for a couple of years as a care worker in an adult detox centre in Leeds, for people who had alcohol problems and met my second placement when I was a social work student was working in community mental health teams, and I quite enjoyed that.

So that's where I kind of went to when I qualified. And most of my work experience, was within, adult mental health. So I worked in several community mental health teams in the Yorkshire area, and then I relocated to the south west, and I was in assessment teams. I was in, some mental health teams, which did sort of short term work, some which did long term work, some which worked with people who were seen as difficult to engage and the last kind of full time social work job I had before I went to academia was working in forensic mental health, which is, work with people who had committed offences, but it was because of their mental health problems, generally speaking. So I worked on a secure unit for 3 to 4 years.

And I guess that's what brought me into research, because a lot of other people in the unit were involved in doing research, and it made me realise it wasn't very much social research in that area. So I've got to do it in a professional doctorate. And, eventually kind of went full time into academia. So I've been here ever since, really. And, I'm based in Cardiff at the moment. That's also where I did my doctorate. But I've worked in a few other places in between as well. Okay. So I guess that's, you know, my, practice background in a, in a nutshell as well.

So, Martin, do you want to tell us a little bit about what your background is in, in terms of social work and social care?

MARTIN
Yeah. So, a bit like you really, I qualified as a social worker in 1996 I believe, and worked in, in Cardiff, immediately after qualifying. So my background is in children's services in all sorts of bits of local authority children's services.

So I've worked at intake and assessment teams. I spent a period of time working in the fostering and adoption team, doing assessments of short break carers for disabled children and their families. I did some work in, commissioning and contracting, covering both adults and children's services actually. So I was covering things like the purchase of, fostering placements, residential care, day services for adults.

And then latterly I was a manager for, in a disabled children's team and a bit like you, I'd done that for about 16 years, I guess 16, 17 years. And I'd always wanted to, to either teach and or do research and so I decided to do, to do a doctorate and came to Cardiff. And luckily for me, my completing my doctorate tied in with CASCADE being established.

So CASCADE is the Children's Social Care Research and Development centre, which was set up in Cardiff literally the last year that I was doing my PhD and I got a job, in that centre, and I've been here ever since, so I've been here, ten years next year. In terms of research, I'm interested in quite a few areas of children's social care, really.

But predominantly things around children who are looked after by the state, including the workforce. So things around people working in residential children's homes, I'm interested in secure accommodation for young people. So quite a range of subjects, really. Yeah. So that's that's me.

JEREMY
Yeah. I mean, that's quite interesting because I suppose I also I'm quite broad in the things that I've looked at as well.

I mean, coming from a mental health background, I've been interested in, the forensic mental health system so that's how I kind of started off but I was also involved in doing mental health act assessments as part of my job. That's where people are assessed under the mental health act. So I've looked at that, particularly on carers views. And then I've also become interested in adult safeguarding because I've been interested in the way that people think about risk and end of life care as well.

And it's, a good opportunity for us as people who are researchers, I guess, isn't it? Because in this podcast, we'll get to meet, people from a whole different range of backgrounds and research interests. So we're going to be talking about research that they're doing or in some cases, practice based research as well.

MARTIN
Yeah. And I mean, for me, coming from practice, into research, one of the things that I'm really keen on is that shortening the distance between between people doing practice, people with lived experience and researchers, you know, I think historically there's always been this idea that people who do research are sort of people who work in ivory towers that don't really have any experience of what it's like to do the job in the real world. And actually, there are a lot of researchers who've come from practice. And I, I don't think research is sort of an add on to social work practice. It's not something you just do when you get your social work qualification or read about whilst you get your social work qualification.

It should be something that informs how we develop services and how we improve services and how we improve outcomes for people who use services. So I think for me, one of the main drivers of doing something like the podcast is to try and make research as accessible as possible for, for people that we know are really time poor.

So they, they've got very busy, very stressful jobs and they don't have time to read academic articles often.

JEREMY
Yeah. I mean, I can associate with that because I suppose when I was in practice, I was interested in research and I did try and, look at things like the British Journal of Social Work, for example. but time is one issue.

But also, I think sometimes academic writing can be quite dense and, not very inviting, really. So hopefully in this series, we'll get to talk to people and ask them to explain some of those things and explore what some of the key points are but also try and put it into plain English, so that practitioners can get a good sense of what the research is about and how it might inform what they're doing, you know, now and in the future.

I mean, one thing it might just be useful for us to tell the listeners about in this short introduction is what Exchange is. So I guess people will have seen as they've clicked the link for this podcast. It's hosted by an organisation by, called Exchange, rather. So do you want to just say who they are?

MARTIN
Yeah, sure. So Exchange is a program that's been established for quite a few years now, which is funded through Health and Care Research Wales.

Which is the sort of funding arm for Health and Social Care Research from Welsh Government. And we're, we're very lucky that that we get funding to run this, by them. So Exchange as a program is about bringing together practitioners, people who are doing research and people with lived experience in ways that enable conversations about practice and outcomes and experiences and how we can improve those.

You know, the end thing is, is how do we make stuff better and how do we use evidence and research and all sorts of forms of evidence. So not just academic research, but lived experience and practitioner wisdom and a whole range of other stuff. And so Exchange covers both, covers the whole of Wales, it covers both adult’s and children’s social care.

And what we do is that we run a program of activities every year. So we do several conference series each year. So, a conference series will be around a particular theme. So it could be say about domestic abuse, or it could be about contextual safeguarding or a whole range of things. And what we do is we put on a range of webinars, get people to do blogs, we do occasionally do podcasts, and we do those over a period of weeks, and we make them accessible to practitioners, to researchers.

So it's a way of having a sort of a dialogue, it's not about just an academic researcher doing a presentation about their research. It's about a two way discussion about, well, I've done this, and what do you think of that? And what's the implications of what I've found for practice where you are or what's the implications of what we found for your lived experience of being a user of social care.

So we run those conferences, which are a main sort of staple of the Exchange program. But then we also do what we call spotlight events so they can be one off. If we find out about somebody who's done a piece of work which is perhaps particularly topical or doesn't really fit into a program that we've got planned, but we think it's important that practitioners and others hear about it.

Then we'll do one off webinars. We also do an annual adoption lecture, which we've done for quite a few years now, which is we get in a speaker to talk about an aspect of, how we're looking to improve adoption and adoption support. So we do that annually. And so this podcast is going to fit into that sort of suite of, of resources, I guess, we have the website, all of the recordings of things like the webinars and things are on there.

So it's built up over a number of years into quite a library of accessible resources for, for people that they can dip into as and when they want to or need to, as I say, to try and improve outcomes and services for people in Wales. We have a Welsh focus, but we get speakers from all around the world.

Before the pandemic, a lot of what we did was face to face. Like lots of things, we've now pretty much migrated everything onto online, which means we are able to get audiences and speakers from all around the world. We did a session a few weeks ago where we had, we were joined by speakers from America who joined us in the early hours of their day in the States, where they could come along and we could ask them questions online.

So I think for Wales, it's a really exciting and importantly, free, accessible resource for anybody who's got an interest in social care.

JEREMY
And I guess the point of the podcast series, that we're starting now is to try and build up a bigger library of, quick podcasts that people could listen to who are time pressed, as we were talking about earlier on.

So we have done podcasts in the past haven’t we and there has been ones that you can see online if you're interested. But I think they've been occasional up until now. So the goal going forward is to, try and make them more regular. And I think the other thing we've been talking about is to try and to alternate them so that they’re focused on adults one week, broadly speaking, and children and families in a different week, but I guess there may be some instances where you've got a topic which applies to both groups of people as well.
Yeah and as you mentioned before, I think the aim is to kind of try and bridge the practice academic divide. So there are a number of different social work podcasts, but I think our aim is to focus primarily on research, but to also try and keep it relatively short and sweet.

So that - yeah.

MARTIN
Yeah. So I think, the aim would be like you say use accessible language. So it's not very ‘academic’ in inverted commas, it's accessible to people. It uses accessible languages. It's also not a marathon listen, it's intended to be a sort of a 20 or 30 minute bite size thing on a particular topic that somebody could listen to in the car or whilst they're walking the dog, or whenever they've got time.

And we know that, you know, some particular topics will be of more interest to some people than others. So people will dip in and out of them based on what their interests are, and that we're hoping to make it varied. Social care is such a broad thing, especially when you when you're trying to cover adults and children, social care, you know, there's lots of opportunity for having quite a varied program of of podcasts. And I think that's what we're aiming for.

JEREMY
So maybe that just leaves us to say thanks for listening to this short introduction. We hope you'll join us for the forthcoming podcast, which is going to be released over the next few months. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Exchange Wales Podcast.

OUTRO
At Exchange Wales, we connect researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to share evidence, practice and insights that shape social care. Our work spans children's and adult social care, and we're also exploring the growing role of artificial intelligence in the sector. If you'd like to learn more or get involved, please visit exchangewales.org