Keep up to date with our work
For regular updates from the Centre for Care team, follow us on Twitter @CentreForCare and enter your email address here to sign up for our newsletter.
Towards a better future for care
Our interactive report highlights a selection of the achievements, policy influence and impact catalysed by the Centre’s activities and research contributions during phase 1 (2021–25). It presents plans for phase 2 (2025–28), including how the Centre will continue to fill critical gaps in knowledge, push boundaries, build research capacity, create new data infrastructure and make a difference in people’s lives.
Explore our report to learn about our methodological innovations, our contribution to theory around care, how we are bridging data gaps, influencing policy change and care practice, enhancing public understandings of care and much more!
The interactive report was edited and designed by Research Retold.
Foreword by Wendy Chamberlain MP
I encourage everyone who reads this report to consider its contents as a call to action. Let us use this knowledge to inform our decisions, inspire innovation, and work together to ensure that every person receives the dignified and comprehensive care they deserve.
It is a privilege to introduce this pivotal report, which shines a light on the essential work being carried out by the Centre for Care.
Care touches all of our lives. At some point we will all need care ourselves, and many of us will also care for others. Care is not merely an issue for policymakers; it is a fundamental pillar of a productive, and compassionate society.
Since their launch in 2021, the Centre for Care has produced rigorous and accessible research on the issues related to care that really matter. Their commitment to co-producing work with those who draw on and provide care has ensured that lived experience sits at the heart of their findings. The Centre’s forward-thinking and outward-looking approach is exactly what is needed to influence the building of a more resilient and equitable care ecosystem for generations to come.
In my own role as an MP campaigning for carers’ rights, I have drawn extensively on Centre for Care’s research. The Centre’s approach, grounded in partnerships with policy and practice experts and lived-experience voices, has consistently demonstrated the urgent need to support unpaid carers and those they care for. I am proud to have sponsored the Carer’s Leave Bill which passed into law in 2023, a milestone that grants unpaid carers the statutory right to take up to five days of unpaid leave from work each year. The rigorous academic research from the Centre for Care was instrumental in demonstrating the need for this crucial support.
Reflections from our Director, Professor Kate Hamblin
Looking back over the three and a half years since the Centre for Care began, we have made substantial contributions to research on care and caring, exploring a broad range of topics that encompass the whole lifecourse; care systems and other connected policy areas; and the perspectives of those giving and receiving care.
We have achieved this in a way that is ethically-grounded and underpinned by insights from lived experience and practice expertise, focused on the questions that matter. We have also worked to ensure we are harnessing existing data wherever possible, and in turn have made this data more accessible to people with a professional or personal interest in care and caring.
As an ESRC and NIHR-funded Centre, our contributions to theory and new methods are integral in how we approach understanding care and caring, as is a focus on driving forward real-world change and public debate. Capacity building – of care scholars at all levels within academia, and organisations and people across the care sector – has also been at the core of our approach.
What is abundantly clear is that our research is needed more than ever. Care is an issue that impacts all of our lives, and in policy terms continues to be an area facing significant challenges.
As we look ahead, we have developed a range of plans for the remainder of the funded period which include a strong focus on generating new knowledge that is accessible to policymakers, commissioners and practitioners to improve policy, practice and the experience of care and caring.
We will continue to work directly with people who receive and provide care in co-produced research, ensuring that solutions are grounded in lived experience. Simultaneously, we will scale up our work to harness and connect available data, providing policymakers with the robust, accessible evidence needed to drive meaningful legislative change.
We will also renew our commitment to investing in the next generation of care experts, training researchers who can tackle these immense challenges with both rigour and empathy.
Click here to learn more about the Centre for Care’s impact on our ‘Impact and Policy’ page.
Keep up to date with our work
For regular updates from the Centre for Care team, follow us on Twitter @CentreForCare and enter your email address here to sign up for our newsletter.