Ethical issues in self-funded social care: co-producing knowledge with older people

This study seeks to to understand ethical dimensions of self-funded care by making visible older people’s experiences of funding their own social care and examining the perspectives of informal carers and those who commission and provide care services.

It is a collaboration between academic researchers, older people, community partners and key stakeholders in the health and social care sector. It aims to co-produce knowledge of older people’s experiences of self-funding in Brighton and Hove, Lincolnshire and Solihull.

The number of older people funding their care has increased dramatically because of changes to statutory social care resulting from cuts to publicly-funded social care and tightening of eligibility criteria. Our project is concerned with ethical issues in the self-funding landscape and understanding the context in which older people secure and manage their own care; and what this means in terms of risks and responsibilities for older people, their informal carers, social care practitioners, service providers and commissioners.

Older people’s perspectives tend to be marginalised, both in policy and practice, which are dominated by managerial concerns of resource allocation and service provision, and in research, where their voices are largely absent. We are addressing this by working with older people as co-researchers and through knowledge exchange meetings with community partners in the health and social care sector.