The news in brief

Here's the latest news from the School of Social Policy. 

• The Department of Social Work & Social Care, including Professor Robin Miller, is working with colleagues in the West Midlands Applied Research Collaboration to lead Public Involvement national research collaboration for adult social care (ARC National Priority on Social Care and Social Work ) The first, important stage was to understand the landscape for public involvement in Adult Social Care and Social Work. A scoping exercise to inform future ways of working in partnership with people who access Adult Social Care Services has been completed, and the report is now available. 
• Professor Jenny Phillimore and Sandra Pertek presented SEREDA project findings at the Call to Action for Prevention of GBV in conflict which is an event consisting of global leads on GBV. They have produced a SEREDA briefing for Call to Action.
• Dr Jason Schaub has been awarded two grants in the past 6 months. One from the School of Social Care Research (NIHR) for £270,000 for a study called 'Understanding the Social Care Assessment Journey of Older LGBTQ+ People.' The grant will support a two-year collaborative study in partnership with a support organisation, Opening Doors and the Universities of Manchester and Bristol. The study will be co-produced with PPI co-researchers and three local authority case study sites.
• HSMC have launched the new online MBA in Clinical Leadership. 
• Dr Sophie King-Hill and Professor Martin Powell have published a new chapter in Social Policy Review 33: Lesson drawing for the UK government during the Covid-19 pandemic: a comparison of political scientific and media lenses.
• Dr Chloe Alexander has published Unequal Conditions of Care and the Implications for Social Policies on Young Carers in the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal.
• IRiS PhD researcher Gabriella D’Avino has published her first single authored article in Critical Social Policy: Framing community sponsorship in the context of the UK's hostile environment.
• Professors Russell Mannion and Mark Exworthy delivered two keynote talks at Organisational Health Services Research of German Network HSR Symposium: Current state of research on organisational behaviour in healthcare and where do we go from here?
• Dr Gëzim Alpion has been granted the Mother Teresa Award, bestowed upon him by Ilir Meta, the President of Albania. The award is in recognition of and a token of gratitude for Alpion’s valuable academic contribution to the thorough study of Saint Mother Teresa’s life and work, and the promotion worldwide of her Albanian national value.
• Dr Angela Ellis-Paine has co-authored a Policy Press Shorts book with several colleagues, based on an inter-disciplinary ESRC-funded study of discourses of voluntary action during the 2010s and 1940s: Transformational Moments in Social Welfare: What Role for Voluntary Action. 
• BRACE Rapid Evaluation Centre has kicked off its latest project exploring digital first primary care for those with multiple long-term conditions. Digital first primary care is when a patient’s first contact for the arrangement of a GP consultation is via digital mechanisms, rather than face-to-face. The use of digital first primary care has been steadily increasing in recent years but has grown rapidly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• PhD student Gary Cooper-Stanton recently presented results of his systematic review of men diagnosed with lymphoedema at the Tissue Viability Conference and won the award for Best Free Paper. 
• The Third Sector Research Centre has been following community responses to COVID-19 across 26 neighbourhoods in England. A second report, Now they see us, has just been published and follows changing challenges and responses to the pandemic from the winter of 2020 and further lockdowns, though to the easing of restrictions in July 2021. A fourteenth rapid research report is also now available which explores sustaining community action during COVID-19.
• Professor Paul Montgomery has published The effectiveness and acceptability of comprehensive and multicomponent school health services: a systematic review in The Journal of Adolescent Health. This review forms the basis of new global WHO Guidance on school health services which Paul helped develop. 
• BA (Hons) Social Work students Diana Katoto and Omar Mohammed have published a chapter called The Road to Activism in the book The Anti-Racist Social Worker. 
• IRiS's Kristina Stoewe has passed her PhD viva with minor corrections. Her thesis is entitled 'Entrepreneurship and integration in the global city: the cases of refugee-origin entrepreneurship in Birmingham and Cologne.' Congratulations to Dr Stoewe.
• Professor Mark Exworthy and colleagues have published Public health interventions in English local authorities: constructing the facts, (re)imagining the future in the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. 
• PhD student Vera Kubenz been invited to contribute an article to the Autumn edition of the Fabian Review on how the global recovery COVID-19 must centre disabled people. 
• Dr Ross Millar has published From Mao to McDonaldization? Assessing the rationalisation of health care in China in Sociology of Health and Illness. 
• Professor Russell Mannion has published Measuring social capital of hospital management boards in European hospitals: A validation study on psychometric properties of a questionnaire for Chief Executive Officers in BMC Health Services Research Journal.
• The Health Research Exchange (HREx) has launched, and is looking for doctoral and early career researchers to join the network. 
• Attention Early Career Researchers (ECRs): UoB will lead a consortium of 13 universities to deliver the new British Academy (BA) Early Career Network pilot, which will help inform an eventual national network. The BA are taking registrations from ECR staff and have organised a set of initial events that are intended to be of interest to the ECR community.  
• BA (Hons) Social Work student Omar Mohamed, has had the opportunity to present at the Global Sexuality in Social Work Conference this year, supported by his academic mentor, Dr Jason Schaub. Omar has also been co-directing an international social work project with IFSW Europe and is soon to be presenting a workshop at the IFSW Europe 2021 Conference in October 2021.