Services & Support Systems
Services and support systems across health, social and educational domains are vital for enabling equity across the life course. This theme examines gaps in services, identifying innovative means to address inefficiencies and ineffectiveness in order to secure enhanced outcomes across people’s lives. Work in this area engages with service development and reform, service use and assessment, and barriers to access. Embracing holistic and multidisciplinary ideas of evaluation, consideration is given to how both micro and macro level forces influence system effectiveness. ILAS partners work in conjunction with multi-agency and multi-sector stakeholders to inform, and lead the development of research-informed interventions to achieve greater impacts for individuals and groups.
Important work streams in the theme of services and support systems includes:
- Critical Gaps in Provision: Programmes that identify, and analyse the public policy conditions that lead to, gaps in service provision for vulnerable and at-risk groups. Examples of work on this theme include: Speech and Language Therapy research on parents’ experiences of interventions focused on communicative disorders of children in bilingual and multicultural settings.
- System Efficiencies and Cost Effectiveness: Analyses of formal and informal aspects of health and social care systems and their impact on related outcomes. Examples of work on this theme include: HEPAC research programmes using health economic evaluation to assess the impact of system efficiencies on health system equity and health outcomes.
- Intervention Development and Evaluation: Activities that inform, support and lead to the development of relevant and impactful interventions in health, social and educations domains. Examples of work on this theme include: CFRC research and evaluation study of TUSLA’s Development and Mainstreaming Programme, CKI led piloting of the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement to demonstrate impact of civic engagement within higher education, ICAN studies to inform policy makers of appropriate service design and intervention for children with Autism.
- Person-Centeredness and Value-Based Models: Work that explores the necessary condition and service provision models to foster and implement value-based philosophies of support. Examples of work on this theme include: CESRD projects on the development and evaluation of person centred models of care for people with dementia, HEPAC work to establish key values of different population groups in relation to alternative preferences for service delivery and prioritisation.
