In June 2025, members of the Sheffield SSCR, alongside colleagues from the Centre for Care and CIRCLE travelled to Helsinki to attend the 7th Transforming Care Conference. The theme of the conference was ‘Social and Human Rights in Care’. In recent decades, there has been increasing discussion about the importance of the human rights approach and the role of social rights in the contexts of long term care and disability, and Transforming Care was the perfect opportunity for SSCR to present to, engage and network with adult social care researchers from across the globe.
Dr Martina Smith (SSCR Research Associate) chaired a session on ‘Transforming care in the lives of people with learning disabilities and their family carers through co production research’ with Professor Katherine Runswick-Cole (Sheffield SSCR Director) as discussant. This powerful session brought together four projects (by Dr Francesca Ribenfors, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Dr Martina Smith, Dr Harriet Cameron, and Charlie Grosset, University of Sheffield), that explored the lives of people with learning disabilities and their family carers in the contexts of health and social care research. They shared their approach to understanding access to support for people with learning disabilities which is guided by a social model of learning disability and argues for a transformative shift away from solely individualised responses and ‘solutions’ to the issues that people with learning disabilities and their families face. They argued that we need to understand the impact of policies and service systems to build better support for people with learning disabilities and their families.
Professor Kate Hamblin (Sheffield SSCR Co-Director) was discussant/chair for a number of lively sessions on Routes out of the care crisis: exploring care system innovations in comparative perspective, and Long-term care policies and Digital technology and care: resources, rights and risks. She also presented work alongside Dr Grace Whitfield on new mediations of care work in England: how digital care systems reorder and reconceptualise care tasks in which they argued that technology systems are not as straightforwardly efficient as socio-technical imaginaries of developers and policymakers would suggest.
This was an invaluable opportunity for Sheffield SSCR to showcase their work on transformations of care in policy and in practice, to better understand adult social care in England in the context of international and global trends, to expand our networks, and equally as importantly, to bond as a team!