Social Care Research Wales – Family Support Services Project question verification form

The purpose of this Question Verification Form is to enable Priority Setting Partnerships (PSPs) to describe clearly how they checked that their questions were unanswered, before starting the interim prioritisation stage of the process.

The JLA requires PSPs to be transparent and accountable in defining their own scope and evidence checking process. This will enable researchers and other stakeholders to understand how individual PSPs decided that their questions were unanswered, and any limitations of their evidence checking.

Name of the PSP

Social Care Wales

Please describe the scope of the PSP

This PSP aimed

to identify the most pressing concerns from parent, family, young people and practitioner perspectives relating to What matters most in developing family support services in Wales? and then to prioritise those that parents, families, young people and practitioners agree are the most important for research to address, and
to take these research priorities to a wider group of stakeholders including researchers and funders to develop these priorities into tractable research questions

The scope of the project was defined as looking at:

Evidence needs related to family support services in Wales where these services are:
- received by families with children under 18 (whether or not children are living at home or in a placement); and
- delivered by a Welsh Local Authority, or commissioned by Local Authorities but delivered by a third sector organisation, or delivered independently by a third sector organisation.
and where evidence needs include (but are not limited to) those that relate to:
- adult services and/or children’s services
- the sustainability of those services, including considerations of work load, effectiveness; cost-containment; and flexibility to adapt to peaks in demand

The Project will exclude from its scope questions about care and support that

have not come from people with relevant lived experience (i.e. responses not from someone who has received or delivered family support services in Wales)

Please provide a brief overview of your approach to checking whether the questions were unanswered

For reasons of practicality, a federated search was applied. This is a keyword / free text only search that excludes the use of thesaurus terms where available (eg. on larger bibliographic databases hosted by platforms such as EBSCO and OVID). Highly focused and targeted searches were conducted rather than a full systematic approach (which would have been impractical within the timeframe of the PSP).

Please list the type(s) of evidence you used to verify your questions as unanswered

The evidence used to verify the questions as unanswered were systematic reviews only. No other study design was included/considered.

Please list the sources that you searched in order to identify that evidence

Social Services Online
Social Care Online (SCIE)
NHS Knowledge and Library Hub
Charitable organisations where relevant (eg. coramBAAF Adoption & Fostering Agency; What Works for Children’s Social Care)
Google and Google Scholar (using advanced search syntaxes)

What search terms did you use?

The following sets were combined for each question:

Set 1 (Used always)

(review or "literature review" or "systematic review" or “systemati* review” or “rapid review” or “realist review”)

Set 2 (Used in most instances, but due to the nature of some questions was not always relevant to include)

("social care" or "social work" or “social services” or “family worker”)

Set 3 (Used always but keywords used varied and were tailored to reflect the specific concepts or focus of each question), e.g.

“parental abuse” or “child to parent abuse” or “child-to-parent abuse” or “child to parent violence” or “child-to-parent violence”

“training” or “education” or “CPD” or “professional development” or “continuing professional development”

relationship or trust or rapport or communicat*

decision-making or “decision making” or decision* or empowerment

Please describe the parameters of the search (eg time limits, excluded sources, country/language) and the rationale for any limitations

Eligibility criteria used for the inclusion of evidence was as follows:

To ensure retrieval of the most recent reviews, searches were restricted to the last 5 years (2018 onwards).
Title and abstract fields were searched where advanced search interfaces were available (eg. on the larger bibliographic databases)
Advanced search syntaxes were used on Google and Google Scholar to identify papers published on other platforms (eg. charitable organisations and other web based sources)
Did not include papers that specifically stated they were focussed on areas other than Wales (eg. titles such as ‘Developing trauma informed practice in Northern Ireland: the child welfare system’)
Retrievals were limited to those published in the languages of English or Welsh
Supplementary searches such as snowballing from key papers were not carried out due to a limited time frame within which searches were required to be completed

Names of individuals who undertook the evidence checking

Dr Hannah Spring

On what date was the question verification process completed?

22nd May 2022

Any other relevant information

N/A