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Explores how the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (IRISS) promotes the delivery of cost effective social services in Scotland that will support the achievement of positive outcomes for people accessing support. It identifies a number of principles that underpin the work of IRISS and suggests how these facilitate innovative evidence-informed practice. The approach to evidence-informed practice comprises four pillars of activity.

Produced by IRISS for Community Care magazine, this research review examines the evidence on allegations of maltreatment of children in foster care and local authority responses to allegations, as published in the report Maltreatment and allegations of maltreatment in foster care. A review of the evidence, published by the Social Policy Research Unit, University of York.

It brings together the evidence that exists on allegations of abuse and confirmed maltreatment in foster care, and considers the implications of the available evidence.

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content, not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have re-emerged.

This article reports on a study of a networked learning approach among remote social work practitioners in a large, rural local authority. The intervention was a blended approach that combined facilitation, face-to-face meetings, online communications and access to e-library resources.

The intervention was focused on discussions of case management issues for three fictional cases. A method of text analysis used in community of enquiry research was implemented to examine participant discourse.

Article explains the rationale for the digitization of social work heritage material and the virtualization of an archived nondigital museum exhibit constructed by a Scottish Museum of Social Work.

The project involved the “virtualization” of an existing social work museum exhibition on the migration of “Home Children” from Scotland to Canada in the late 19th and early 20th century and the digital preservation of historical assets (both text and images) held by the contemporary social care organization involved in the migration of the children.

This paper summarizes the results of an evaluation of students' perspectives comparing learning from a multimedia case-based learning object with learning from text-based case studies. A secondary goal of the study was to test the reusability of the learning object in different instructional contexts. The learning object was deployed in the context of a problem-based learning approach to teaching social work students in three different courses in two different countries: Scotland (N=39) and Canada (N=57).

Despite 40 years of research into evidence-based policy (EBP) and a continued drive from both policymakers and researchers to increase research uptake in policy, barriers to the use of evidence are persistently identified in the literature. However, it is not clear what explains this persistence – whether they represent real factors, or if they are artefacts of approaches used to study EBP. Based on an updated review, this paper analyses this literature to explain persistent barriers and facilitators.

Little research has been done into what social workers do in everyday child protection practice. This paper outlines the broad findings from an ethnographic study of face-to-face encounters between social workers, children and families, especially on home visits.

Public participation in planning and implementing health care has become a government mandate in many states. In UK mental health services, this 'user involvement' policy dates back nearly three decades and has now become enshrined in policy. However, an implementation gap in terms of achieving meaningful involvement and influence for service users persists.

Resource allocation systems based upon measures of need are one widely adopted approach to estimating the cost of the individual service user's care package in a manner directly proportionate to individual need.

However, some recent studies have questioned the feasibility and utility of such systems, arguing that the relationship between needs and costs cannot be modelled with sufficient accuracy to provide a useful guide to individual allocation. In contrast, this paper presents three studies demonstrating that this is possible.