Within her current role Sophie’s team is working towards improving the accessibility of official social care statistics to continue to improve evidence around this sector. Through engagement with stakeholders across the four nations, whilst working with the Government Statistical Service Harmonisation team, her aim is to help make statistics more comparable, consistent and coherent. The Social Care Analysis team have produced a UK Adult Social Care Landscape that compiles official publications into one place to help improve accessibility, harmonisation, and coherence across the four nations. The ONS, working with partners across the sector can play an important leadership and coordination role within adult social care statistics.
More recently, Sophie has been working on the production of COVID-19 related deaths in the care setting which she continues to monitor by publishing weekly outputs. To help us understand more about the causes of death in care home residents, including characteristics, to inform policy, Sophie has produced a new annual release for ONS reporting deaths in care home residents.
Sophie’s work identifies gaps in evidence in adult social care data and recent work has involved understanding the social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on unpaid carers, analysing life expectancy in care homes and producing estimates of the number of people who self-fund their care in care homes in England.
Sophie is co-investigator for the ESRC-funded Centre for Care and co-supervises four ESRC Collaborative PhD Studentships on unpaid care at the universities of Sheffield and Birmingham which will involve linking population and administrative data including the 2021 Census.
Research interests
- The impact that being a care giver has on people’s lives, how care inequalities are experienced, and how care varies over the life course thinking about transitions into and out of care to understand care journeys and outcomes.
- The general health, mental health and mortality of unpaid carers in comparison to those who do not provide informal care.
- Social mobility of those who provide unpaid care compared to those who do not provide informal caregiving.
- The volume and value of privately funded provision of adult social care and the burden placed on unpaid carers.
- “At risk” groups e.g., young carers, the sandwich generation, and the interaction with intergenerational living.
- Differences in definitions and data on social care workforce.
Social profiles
@ONS
@GSSHealth