The problem

More people than ever are receiving care and support from both health and social care services, but often the care they receive is not well co-ordinated. Recently NHS and Social Care organisations have been trying to work better together and some of them have set up ‘Integrated Teams’ of health and social care staff who work together across a local area.

Health and social care staff working in these teams need to be able to share knowledge with one another, but people from different organisations and professions sometimes struggle to share what they know. This is because they sometimes have very different ways of looking at the world which are often hidden in the ways that they work. This means that they often ‘talk past’ one another.

Lots of work has been done into how knowledge can be moved into practice, but most of this has focused on ‘codified’ knowledge (such as research findings and other things that can be written down). Less has been done on how staff from different organisations and professions share tacit, practice-based knowledge (what they know and what they do) with each other and how they can be supported to do so.

This project was designed to address these problems by focusing on how people working in health and social care share practice-based knowledge with one another.

Please visit the ‘Aims & Objectives‘ and ‘Project Methods‘ pages to find out more.