Extending the Coventry Family Hubs Evaluation to the National Centre for Family Hubs
Dr Ila Bharatan
Dr IIa Bharatan currently works as a Lecturer of Organisation Theory in the Work, Organisation and Management Group at University of Liverpool Management School. Prior to this she worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at WBS under the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration, during which time she was awarded the Policy Support Funding for her work with Family Hubs.
More generally Dr Bharatan's research focuses on skill development and learning from a practice perspective as well as the implementation of service innovations in health and social care sectors. She is interested in how phenomenon such as learning and innovation implementation are accomplished in mundane, day-to-day practices and uses qualitative methods, primarily ethnography to answer these questions.
What challenges has this project addressed?
Family Hubs provide families with a single point of access to integrated family support services. They provide targeted services and early help with social, emotional, physical, and financial needs to children 0-19 years and their families. They are usually located in areas of high deprivation where such services provide the most benefit.
A University of Warwick Project, led by Dr IIa Bharatan and funded by the Policy Support Fund, aided project partners to better understand innovation implementation process issues around service expansion and service integration.
How was this achieved?
Approximately 40 semi-structured interviews were completed across three local authority (LA) areas and analysed. Using this analysis, the research team are in the process of creating learning insights and reports for the LAs.
Reports were provided for individual LAs as well as a shared learning insights report for LAs, the Department for Education and Anna Freud National Centre for Family Hubs (AFC). These reports will enable AFC to advance their existing implementation tool kit as well as enabling the Department for Education to make decisions about Family Hub implementation.
Positioning research in a regional and national context
The Family Hubs are an area of significant national policy interest for both the Department for Education and the Department for Health and Social Care. The government made a manifesto commitment in 2019 to champion Family Hubs to make effective, integrated early help easily accessible to families. Funding from the Policy Support Fund has enabled the research team to identify several challenges facing Family Hubs. These include thematic issues around space and place; challenges around the identity of the Family Hubs; and expansion and integration of the Family Hubs within the community. Access to the Hub resources was identified as an issue for service users. Using the challenges identified, next steps can be taken to further research these aspects of the Family Hubs to enable their implementation as integral community assets in areas of need. This also fits into the broader place-based health agenda which is of emerging national interest in the UK.
Changes and benefits of the research
The research team will use the LAs in the study as case studies so that other LAs across the UK can learn about Family Hub service expansion and integration both in terms of best practices and challenges.