Social care is a vital UK sector employing 1.6 million people, the majority of whom (1.2 million) are front line carers who don’t have access to the training and skills development they need for their daily work. On-the-job learning is often within lengthy policy documents or journal articles which are time consuming and difficult to digest. Poor support adversely affects job satisfaction and contributes to high staff turnover.
This project will develop a mobile app providing digital information and support for front line care staff. It will deliver bitesize, trusted information in real time and in convenient and digestible formats. Engaging formats such as curated content, infographics, and videos will help address users’ needs including language or cultural barriers. It will be portable and accessible to enable learning during the day, helping carers feel more supported by delivering trusted, practical information in response to real time learning needs.
SCIE’s strong reach and reputation provides an opportunity to shape and influence training for frontline workers at scale. They are committed to innovation and ensuring everything they do is co-created by people with lived experience. SCIE’s trusted best practice, evidence and guidance will form the foundation for the tool, with subject matter experts ensuring the synthesised and vetted content is reliable and safe. The tool will have a search function coded with rules and structured responses to mitigate against biases, with a longer-term ambition to develop an artificial intelligence data-driven system trained on SCIE’s existing materials to deliver content.