The birth of the Social Care Elf

I really like the Mental Elf. If you haven’t come across this friendly woodland creature, the Mental Elf selects high quality mental health research of relevance to practitioners, appraises it and writes about it in an accessible way. The blog posts are really engaging and help to reduce the gap between the mental health science and practice. Also available as a mobile app, the Mental Elf is handy whenever you have a few minutes spare to update yourself on the latest research findings.

Some time ago I suggested to André Tomlin, Chief Blogger for the Mental Elf, that the National Elf Service could do with a Social Care Elf to help make social care and social work research more accessible for practitioners. After discussions involving the NIHR School for Social Care Research, Personal Social Services Research Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Social Services Research Group, I’m really pleased to join André in announcing the creation of the Social Care Elf. In a joint post on the LSE Social Care Evidence in Practice blog, we announce the imminent arrival of the new elf in the woodland.

The Social Care Elf will be lots of fun and if you can be in London on 25th July, there is an opportunity for you to join in too. Between 10.30am and 1.00pm on 25th July you can pop along to the LSE and help design the Social Care Elf. Each elf in the National Elf Service has its own unique identity and we want to create one for the Social Care Elf with your help. Please email sscr@lse.ac.uk to register your interest in this.

You can find out more about the Social Care Elf on the Social Care Evidence in Practice blog.