End-of-life care: ensuring everyone is prepared (Professor Nancy Preston)

An innovative collaboration upskilling healthcare professionals

Respecting people’s wishes for end-of-life care can mean a better outcome for the individual and the healthcare services involved. But achieving this requires conversations which may be difficult for patients, families and professionals alike. Nancy Preston, Professor of Supportive & Palliative Care and Co-Director of the International Observatory on End-of-Life Care led this project. “During Covid, we had a study running in care homes. It was about working with residents and their families on advance decision making. Off the back of that, we got ESRC funding to develop online training for care home staff. That changed care straight away: staff and families who were previously very nervous about these discussions now felt able.”

Seeing the potential to adapt this resource for all healthcare workers, Nancy brought in two key project partners to co-develop a solution based on supporting Advance Care Planning discussions. East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT) wanted to reduce the number of people dying in hospital instead of where they would prefer. At the same time, North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) asked to get involved: there was a huge impact to be had on their response to end-of-life care calls.

Sustainable food: adapting to the needs on the ground (Dr Beccy Whittle and Dr Rachel Marshall)

In-built flexibility in project funding opens up collaboration and delivers more than anticipated

“It was never our ambition to have a 2030 community food strategy at the start, nor to go on to receive £1.5m in National Lottery funding,” says Rachel Marshall, a knowledge exchange fellow at Lancaster University. “But when the pandemic hit, it massively changed our project – and it has totally changed my career path. The ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), being so responsive and agile, was definitely the enabler for that.”

It all began with the voluntary work that Rachel and her colleague Beccy Whittle had been doing with Food Futures, North Lancashire’s Sustainable Food Network. This initiative brings together farmers, food businesses, the public sector, community food groups and local academic institutions, as part of the wider Sustainable Food Places social movement. “Our idea was to get these stakeholders to collaborate better, so that more could be achieved collectively,” explains Beccy, a senior lecturer at Lancaster Environment Centre.

Separation at birth: learning from lived experience (Dr Claire Mason)

Funding gives mums and midwives a chance to change practice

When a newborn is taken into care, safeguarding is focused on the infant, not the mother or the midwives making the best of a traumatic situation. Now a project developed with NHS England by Lancaster University, joint funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), is harnessing a wealth of experience to co-produce a solution with the potential to become best practice.

Claire Mason, a Research Fellow at the University’s Centre for Child and Family Justice Research, was leading the qualitative work on a wider project drafting new national guidelines for when the state intervenes at birth. “As part of that,” she says. “We had assembled an advisory group of women with lived experience of separation at birth. And Becs Reynolds, who chairs the National Maternity Safeguarding Network, asked us to come and speak about our work.”

“It was a meeting of minds,” says Becs, National Safeguarding Clinical Lead for NHS England. “Claire brought one of her Lived Experience Group to the session and it was incredibly powerful. So we got our heads together to ask What would a solution look like? What already exists? And there were pockets of amazing practice where midwives, off their own backs, had created a version of what would become the Giving HOPE intervention.”

Immersing consumers in the story behind their choices (Dr Ben Neimark)

How IAA funding has brought home the true cost of vanilla.

Everyday shopping decisions can make the difference between life or death in upstream commodity chains. But does knowledge of how our purchases are produced actually change our behaviour? A partnership between the Lancaster Environment Centre and The Eden Project, enabled by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), may help to find out.

“Who doesn’t eat ice cream or use the thousands of products vanilla makes its way into, from cleaning products to perfumes?” says Dr Ben Neimark, a senior lecturer in human geography who built on years of research in Madagascar to set up the project. “What we cannot do is lose sight of the production aspects. So the idea was to reconnect consumers with their product. Eden was the ideal space to bring the research back home and make it impactful.”

Learning from a community success story (Professor Emmanuel Tsekleves)

What lessons can the rest of the UK learn from a community health initiative in the Lancashire coastal town of Fleetwood?

This question underpinned a collaborative project, funded by an Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) and conducted by ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University, which uses design-led research to make a difference in the real world.

Healthier Fleetwood began life in 2016 as an innovative point of contact for the community, supporting them to improve their own health and wellbeing. “It’s run by the residents for the benefit of the residents,” says local GP Dr Mark Spencer, who helped set up the volunteer network. “It’s about connecting residents to services and to each other, overcoming social isolation, motivating and encouraging people to become more active, to engage in community-type activities, whether those activities are singing, or art, or walking football.”

Over the following years, Lancaster University had built up a strategic partnership with Healthier Fleetwood, with research focused on health outcomes in the town including an EPSRC IAA-funded project to explore the impact of COVID-19 on the community. With the benefit of ESRC IAA growth funding, a project was developed to capture the lessons learned.

Creating connections post-adoption through letter exchanges (Dr Lisa Morriss)

Building relationships to improve mental health and wellbeing

The importance for adopted children of continued contact with their birth families has long been recognised. The usual mechanism is an annual exchange of letters between the families, an imperfect solution which has a profound impact on the mental health and wellbeing of birth mothers. Now a collaborative project, funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), is changing how letter exchange is viewed and used.

Lisa Morriss is a lecturer in social work at Lancaster University. Her research had shown how existing arrangements fail both adoptive and birth families. She cites letters that never came, stopped coming, or seemed too formulaic, and highlights the way COVID-19 compounded the anxiety of ‘not knowing’. She wanted to do something about this problem – and the IAA Health & Wellbeing funding call proved a good fit.

Expanding the conversation about reproductive rights (Dr Rachel Eastham)

As a society, who do we think is fit to parent – and who gets to decide?

According to Rachael Eastham, a Senior Research Associate in Lancaster University’s Division of Health Research, UK provision of Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) such as implants, IUD/IUS or injections falls short of globally agreed reproductive rights due to under-recognised discriminatory norms and practices. When an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) gave her the opportunity to share the findings of her research, the project was to have a far broader impact than she anticipated.