Professor Julien Forder
Julien Forder is Professor of the Economics of Social Policy and Director of PSSRU at the University of Kent and a Principal Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. Previously Julien was seconded to the King’s Fund as project lead for the Wanless social care review. Before that, Julien had been seconded to the Strategy Unit in the Department of Health, providing advice to Ministers on social care and related areas of health policy. He is an economist and has conducted research in both health and social care for many years.
Julien was the Principal Investigator during the national evaluation of the personal health budget pilot programme.
Dr Karen Jones
Dr Karen Jones is a Senior Research Fellow at the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent, England. I managed the national evaluation of the personal health budgets pilot programme and was the key link to the Department of Health policy team and pilot sites. Furthermore, I was a quantitative analyst in the social care evaluation of the individual budgets pilot programme and in a study exploring the cost-effectiveness of the home care re-ablement service.
Overall, my research interest focuses on policy evaluations that explore the effectiveness and costs of new health and social care initiatives that sit at the heart of the personalisation agenda in England.
James Caiels
James Caiels has been active in health and social care research for over 10 years and has been at the Personal Social Services Research Unit since 2007. His recent work includes the Personal Health Budgets Evaluation study funded by the Department of Health. Previously James worked on the HM Treasury funded Measuring Outputs for Public Service Users project (MOPSU) in conjunction with the Office for National Statistics. The aim of this project was to encourage the use of outcome based measures to assess the impact of services on users and to inform policy and decision making. He is currently lead researcher on the Engagement strand of the Quality and Outcomes of person centred care (QORU) policy Research Unit.
Elizabeth Welch
Elizabeth has seven years experience of health and social care academic research projects. Elizabeth has been part of the Personal Health Budgets Evaluation and its bolt on substance misuse evaluation, both of which were funded by the Department of Health. Most recently she has been involved in the Ascot Feedback Intervention Study (AFIS). The aim here was to examine whether structured feedback about quality of life can have an impact on care home residents’ daily lives. Previous to this Elizabeth was involved in the Measuring the Productivity of Workforce Development in Care Homes project (an extension of the overarching MOPSU project). She was also extensively involved in two stands of the HM Treasury funded Measuring Outputs for Public Service Users (MOPSU)project. This involved developing methodology, conducting fieldwork and also managing the recruitment of care homes in to the study, and the team of fieldworkers. The aim of these projects was to create a new mechanism for more effective and efficient measurement and monitoring of third sector public services, reducing the burden on the third sector while releasing cash through more efficient use of public funds to provide public services.
Diane Fox
Diane Fox is a Research Officer at Personal Social Services Research Unit at the University of Kent. Her research interests are unpaid carers, inequalities and the personalisation of health and social care. Since joining the unit in 2008, she has worked on projects developing national social care user surveys and has recently completed an analysis of the Personal Social Services Survey of Adult Carers in England (PSS SACE). Her interest in the personalisation of care began when working on a scoping study of the personalisation of services in social care, funded by the National Institute of Health Research’s School for Social Care Research. Prior to joining PSSRU she held research posts in both the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of General Practice at St George’s Medical School.