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Executive Editor

Dr Jose Luis Fernandez is Deputy Director and Associat Professorial Research Fellow at PSSRU, London School of Economics and Political Science. A health and social care economist, he specialises in ageing-related policies, the interaction between health and social care, and the economic evaluation of health and social care services and systems.
In 2010, he co-founded the International Long-term care Policy Network (ILPN) linking academics and policy makers on the analysis of long-term care, and also set-up the Economics of Social and Health Care Research Unit together with the universities of Kent and York, and the Quality and Outcomes Research Unit with universities of Kent and Oxford. He has advised bodies such as the English Department of Health, the UK Treasury and the World Health Organisation.

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Managing Editor

Michael has worked at local, regional and national levels undertaking and managing research. His research interests include mental health, dementia, public involvement in research, and arts and care.
He also has an interest in the interfaces between research, policy and practice and issues of implementation. Michael currently works as the Research Programme Manager for the NIHR School for Social Care Research and is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow within PSSRU at LSE.


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Assistant Editor

Juliette is a Assistant Professorial Research Fellow within PSSRU at LSE and the University of Kent. She is also a member of the Quality and Outcomes of person centred care (QORU) policy research unit.
Her research interests include the measurement of outcomes and quality in long-term care, performance and quality of long-term care systems, regulation of long-term care and financing of long-term care systems.
She is a member of the team that developed ASCOT, a new measure of social care outcomes for use in economic evaluation, and led the development of the Adult Social Care Survey that is currently used by the Department of Health and Social Care to monitor the quality of care provided to publicly-funded service users. Juliette has also contributed to various studies looking at the future of funding for social care.

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Editorial Officer

Editorial Board

David joined the Norah Fry Research Centre in 1999 and a central feature of his work has been the privilege and excitement of asking new and important questions in previously neglected areas. It is this access to and analysis of ‘intimate stories’ (in the sociological tradition of writers like Plummer) which has allowed him to ‘trouble’ ideological assumptions and policy rhetoric about the lives of disabled children and adults – and their families and allies. And it is this close examination of the research encounter which continues to encourage him to ‘trouble’ some of the emerging methodological wisdoms about research with children and the role of the adult researcher (e.g. ‘Who Says What, Where, Why and How?’, 2013; ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’, 2012).

Much of body of work can be characterised as ‘first-wave’. In the case of disabled children placed in residential schools, research investigated the extent to which they were afforded their legal rights (and led to questions in Parliament and changes in law as a result) but also explored the experiences of families and disabled youngsters involved, leading to often unexpected and ideologically contentious findings (‘Best Place to Be?’, 2001). A study of whether ‘multi-agency working’ made a difference to disabled children demonstrated that despite the rhetoric of partnership working, families and disabled children themselves were experiencing few if any associated benefits (‘Proof of the Pudding’, 2005). Almost nothing was known about the lives of gay and lesbian people with learning disabilities before his research in this area and ‘Secret Loves, Hidden Lives?’ (2002-05) spawned changes in perceptions, practice, national policy and research nationally and internationally.Most recently nothing was known about the lives of a generation of young men with muscular dystrophy who were, as a result of advances in medical sciences, still alive when no-one had expected them to be (‘Becoming an Adult’, 2008-10). This in turn led to his NIHR SSCR research project, where, within the neuromuscular field, there had previously been no work on the intersection of disability and masculinity (‘Men & Long Term Conditions’, 2012-14). In this grant David continued his interest in exploring the methodological underpinnings of qualitative research by using Conversation Analysis to compare the data elicited by him and that of his co-researcher who has the same condition as the men they are interviewing. This is an attempt to develop the evidence base for user involvement in research – a phenomenon regarded as ideologically ‘good’ but largely devoid of evidence that it makes a positive difference.

His current study continues collaborations with men with neuromuscular disease and explore preferences and experiences of conversations about end of life care: http://www.musculardystrophyuk.org/grants/exploring-the-views-of-men-with-duchenne-muscular-dystrophy-on-end-of-life-care-decision-making/

Davis is an Associate Director of the NIHR School for Social Care Research

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Giovanni Lamura is a social gerontologist with an international and interdisciplinary background, working at INRCA (Italian National Institute of Health and Science on Ageing) since 1992. He graduated in economics in Italy in 1990; obtained a PhD in "Life course and social policy" at Bremen University (Germany) in 1995; was visiting fellow in 2006-07 at the University of Hamburg-Eppendorf (Germany); and research director of the pillar “health and care” of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research in Vienna (Austria) in 2010-11. Currently he leads INRCA’s Centre for Socio-Economic Research on Ageing (link). He has gained experience in international research projects mainly focused on family and long-term care of dependent older people (EUROFAMCARE); work-life balance (Carers@work); migrant care work (Filling the Gap in LTC through Migration); prevention of elder abuse and neglect (ABUEL); ICT-based initiatives to support informal carers (CARICT and INNOVAGE); intergenerational solidarity (Let’s Re-Generate); and interdisciplinary research on ageing in general (FUTURAGE and MOPACT).

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Jill is Professor of Social Work at King's College London, Director of the Social Care Workforce Research Unit and NIHR Senior Investigator Emeritus. She participated in a Senior Leadership programme funded by the NIHR with Ashridge Management School. Currently she is involved in advisory work for the Department of Health on several subjects and works closely with several social care and health sector employers to link research, policy and practice.

In the past year she has presented research findings to international conferences in Australia, Singapore, Norway and Northern Ireland; she also travels widely in the UK to speak with local and regional networks, mainly through Making Research Count. She works on a number of Unit studies that are funded by the Department of Health and also on other studies funded by the NIHR, the ESRC, and research charities with Unit colleagues and other research teams. Jill also provides assistance on workforce matters to local councils, NHS bodies, and employers on a pro bono basis and to user, carer and patient groups about evidence and communications. She provides expert advice to NICE and to other NHS Arm's Length Bodies about care services and workforce initiatives.

Within King's College London, Jill supervises post-graduate and doctoral students to build capacity in workforce research.

Jill is a Trustee of the Order of St John Care Trust and of the Centre for Policy on Ageing and Patron of the Greater London Forum of Older People.

She is a Fellow of Skills for Care and was appointed Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in March 2015.

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Marthe Nyssens is a Full professor at the Department of Economics of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium,where she is the president of a research center 'Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires Travail, Etat, Société (CIRTES). She has been acting as a founding member of the EMES European Research Network. Se holds a Master in economics (University of California at San Diego),) and a Ph.D. in economics (University of Louvain). Her work focuses on conceptual approaches to the third sector (associations, cooperatives, social enterprises), both in developed and developing countries (West Africa and Latin America), as well as on the links between third sector organisations and public policies. Her recent work focuses on the emergence of different social enterprise models in an international comparative perspective as well as the role of social enterprise in the field of work integration and care. In addition to numerous articles in academic journals and chapters in books, she has authored or (co-)edited books among which Social Enterprise (Routledge, 2006 also in Korean), and The Worldwide Making of the Social Economy: Innovations and Changes (Acco, Leuven, 2009).

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Heinz Rothgang is Professor of Health Economics at the University of Bremen and Director of the Division for Health Economics, Health Policy and Outcomes Research, Centre for Social Policy Research, Bremen, Germany.

Prior to that he was professor of Health Economics and Outcomes Research at the University of Applied Sciences in Fulda. His research interests are in the field of long-term care economics, health economics and policy, as well as welfare state economics, politics and policy - fields in which he has published widely.

Heinz Rothgang also serves regularly on various government committees and advisory bodies.

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Professor Ulrike Schneider is Director of the WU Research Institute for Economics of Ageing. Head of Department of Socioeconomics and the Institute for Social Policy at the WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Austria. A major focus of her research is on economics of long-term care, particularly family care, care services, the role of assistive technologies and funding of care.

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With studies in Sociology and a doctorate in Social Work, Gerdt Sundström began to work at the Institute of Gerontology in 1985. There he does teaching and research, as he did before at the School of Social Work in Stockholm. His main area of interest is formal and informal care and the balance between what the state and the family are doing for older people. This has produced a number of studies, most of them on care in the community.
Some of these studies represent initiatives that have received funding from research foundations and others are commissioned work for government agencies. For example, Socialstyrelsen (the National Board of Health and Welfare) has funded a number of studies, among them two national surveys of living conditions and care for persons 75+ living in the community in 1994 and 2000. Usually these studies are co-authored with colleagues at the Institute of Gerontology or other academic institutions.
Recurrent themes in these studies are historical perspectives and international comparisons concerning both family care and public services for old people. In recent years Gerdt has continued work with colleagues on informal care and its relationship with demographic factors.

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Gerald's current academic work includes evaluations of the Integrated Care and Support Pioneer Programme and the North West London Whole System Integrated Care initiative. He is also contributing to studies of the economic case for community capacity building, an EU programme on the role of the third sector in social innovation, and the impact of spending constraints on adult social care.

He has previously been Co-director of the Centre for Social Policy Research at Loughborough University, Director of the Nuffield Institute for Health at Leeds University, Chair of a Primary Care Trust and was, for ten years, a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Health Committee. He has published extensively on a wide range of health and social care issues.

He has served as the scientific adviser to the Department of Health's Individual Budgets pilot programme (2005-08), was the scientific adviser to the Department of Health's Demonstration Programme for the Common Assessment Framework for Adults, advised the Cabinet Office on the proposals for personal budgets in the NHS and was seconded to the DH team working on integration policy. He has also advised the States of Jersey Scrutiny Committee on Health, the Audit Commission on integrated commissioning, and the Department of Health on the preparation of Green and White Papers. He chaired the Advisory Board for the Turning Point Centre of Excellence for Connected Care.

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Martin is Professor of Social Policy and Director of PSSRU at LSE. He has also been Director of the NIHR School for Social Care Research since 2009.
His current research emphases are primarily dementia, child and adult mental health, autism and long-term social care; much of his work has an economic focus, and in all of it he seeks to tease out the policy implications. He has published almost 600 peer-review journal papers and 15 books. His work has had numerous impacts on policy and practice in these areas.


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Lennarth Johansson is a psychologist with a PhD in social medicine. In 2002 he was made an Associate Professor in Gerontology. He has almost thirty years of experience working as a Senior Research Associate, specializing in housing, services and the care of elderly people. His main fields of interest are informal caregiving and the social policy of eldercare. In 1993 Lennarth joined the National Board of Health and Welfare as a research leader with responsibility for the evaluation of eldercare reforms. During recent years he has also been involved in several international comparative studies on the care of elderly people. Since the start of 2010 he has divided his time between the National Board of Health and Welfare and the Aging Research Center where he is a senior researcher in the social gerontology group.

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Naoki Ikegami, MD, PhD, MA is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Keio School of Medicine, from which he received his MD and PhD. He also received a Master of Arts degree in health services studies with Distinction from Leeds University (United Kingdom). During 1990-1991, he was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Medical School, and has continued to be a Senior Fellow at Wharton. He is a founding member of interRAI (a non-profit international consortium of researchers and clinicians focused on care planning instruments), and served as a consultant to the WHO and the World Bank. He is currently President of the Japan Society of Healthcare Administration and the Japan Health Economics Association. He sits on various national and state government committees, including the Chair of the Investigative Specialist Sub-committee on Case-mix Based Reimbursement for Chronic Inpatient Care and member of the Reforming Elder Healthcare Conference. His research areas are health policy, long-term care and pharmacoeconomics. His publications include “The Art of Balance in Health Policy – Maintaining Japan’s Low-Cost Egalitarian System” (Cambridge University Press, 1998) with John C. Campbell, “Quality Life Evaluation Handbook for Clinicians” (Igakushoin, 2001) in Japanese with Shunichi Fukuhara et al, “Measuring the quality of long-term care in institutional and community settings” in “Measuring Up – Improving Health Care Performance in OECD Countries” (OECD, 2002) with John Hirdes and Iain Carpenter, “Games policy makers and providers play: Introducing case-mix based payment to chronic care hospital units in Japan (JHPPL, 2009).

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Jennifer Beecham is Professor of Health and Social Care Economics at the University of Kent and a Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is Deputy Director of PSSRU at the University of Kent and leads two PSSRU Research Programmes: the Unit Costs programme, which generates the annual Unit Costs of Health and Social Care volumes; and the Services for Children and Young People programme. Professor Beecham also spent 13 years at the Centre for the Economics of Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, London (now King's Health Economics).

Professor Beecham's research over the last 30 years has generally taken an economic perspective. As well as a wealth of experience in estimating and analysing unit costs, her research includes evaluations of services for adults with needs related to old age, mental health problems, intellectual disabilities and a range of conditions that cross ‘traditional' health and social care boundaries, such as eating disorders and disability. Over the last 15 years, Professor Beecham has also worked on economic studies of psychiatric, education, health care, and social care services for children and young people.

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Blache's work - conducted in a national and comparative perspective in Europe - focuses on care policies and more specifically on policies aimed at vulnerable elderly people as well as early childhood policies. She is interested in both public services and the way families organize themselves by mobilizing these services to face the difficulties encountered in everyday life. The question of the role of family carers, very much in demand to accompany their elderly parents with loss of autonomy, is at the center of her latest research, as well as the notions of coordination and integration explored in the framework of comparative studies.

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Yvonne trained as a general and children's nurse specialising in intensive care, before moving into research. She joined the University as a researcher in the Department of Health Sciences in 1999 and moved to SPRU in 2013 from York Trials Unit where she was deputy director. Over the years she has worked on projects spanning the life course but is particularly interested in issues around professional/ public attitudes and behaviour, particularly in relation to the quality and safety of care. She is a mixed methods researcher with expertise in developing projects that evaluate complex interventions in both health and social care.

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Professor Campbell is interested in how policies change from agenda-setting through implementation, and on the relationship between politics and substantive public policy. He works mostly on Japan, often in comparative perspective, these days mainly about social policy including health care and Japan’s new public, mandatory long-term-care insurance system. Other interests include the auto industry, US-Japan relations, and organization theory.

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David Challis is Professor of Community Care Research and Director of the PSSRU at the University of Manchester. PSSRU, with its three branches, is the largest grouping in the UK focussing on research in long term and social care. The work of the Unit has had impact on policy and practice in a number of countries, including work on case management and care coordination.

He has been an adviser on services for older people to the Commonwealth Government of Australia, Canadian Province of Ontario, Governments of France, Ireland, Hong Kong, Japan, the US State Government of Wisconsin, the Department of Health in England and the National Assembly for Wales.

He has undertaken the development and evaluation of a series of studies of community based care for older people which provided alternatives to hospital and nursing home care and influenced policy development both in the UK and internationally. He has been responsible for national studies of care coordination in older people’s and long term conditions services and evaluation of assessment procedures in England. Other work includes performance measurement in older people’s services, hospital discharge, the evaluation of innovative approaches to flexible support such as personal budgets and a range of studies in old age mental health services. Current work includes: Home Support in Dementia Care; the use of Memory Aids; European variations in access to care and support for people with dementia; and dementia diagnosis in minority ethnic elders. New studies involve the work of community mental health teams, support to care homes and social care for prisoners consequent on new responsibilities arising under the 2014 Care Act. He is the author of 21 books and over 200 papers. Books include Supporting People with Dementia at Home (Ashgate, 2009)

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Barbara Da Roit obtained a PhD in Sociology (Science-Po Paris) and in Urban and Local European Studies (University of Milan-Bicocca) in 2005. She has done research and taught at the University of Milan-Bicocca (2005-2007), Utrecht University (2007-2013) the University of Amsterdam (2013-2016).

Her work focuses mainly on the transformations of European welfare systems from a comparative perspective, with a specific attention to care, ageing and intergenerational relations. Her research combines qualitative and quantitative methods.

She participated in several international research projects on care policies and practices, on the consequences of cash-for-care schemes, on the conciliation between care and paid employment, on parenting support policies, on migrant care workers.

Over the years she has been teaching sociological theories, economic and welfare sociology, social policy within sociology and interdisciplinary programs. She has supervised undergraduate, graduate and PhD students.

She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the International Journal of Care & Caring, of the scientific committee of the journal Autonomie Locali e Servizi Sociali (Il Mulino) and of the series Transizioni e Politiche Pubbliche (Fondazione Bignaschi/Franco Angeli). She regularly acts as a peer reviewer for national and international journals and research agencies.


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Julien Forder is Professor of the Economics of Social Policy. Until recently he was also an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. In the past, Julien has been seconded to the King's Fund as project lead for the Wanless social care review and to the Strategy Unit in the Department of Health, providing advice to Ministers on social care and related areas of health policy. He is an economist and has conducted research in social care for many years.

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Dr. Courtney Van Houtven is a Professor in The Department of Population Health Science, Duke University School of Medicine and a Research Scientist in Health Services Research and Development in Primary Care at the Durham Veteran’s Administration. Dr. Van Houtven’s aging and economics research interests encompass long-term care financing, intra-household decision-making, informal care, and end-of-life care. She examines how family caregiving affects health care utilization, expenditures, health and work outcomes of care recipients and caregivers. She is also interested in understanding how best to support family caregivers to optimize caregiver and care recipient outcomes.

In an R-01 from The National Institutes of Nursing Research, NIH, Dr. Van Houtven examined the relationship between family structure, informal caregiving, and long-term care insurance (2011-2014). She recently completed an RCT testing the effectiveness of a skills training program for family caregivers of Veteran patients with functional and/or cognitive limitations who were referred to community-based long-term care, or HI-FIVES (VA HSR&D IIR 11-345). She is co-PI on the newly awarded QUERI Program Project, “Optimizing Function and Independence”, leading implementation of HI-FIVES at 8 sites nationally. She directs the VA-Cares Evaluation Center in the Durham COIN, which recently completed a national evaluation of the VA’s Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers (PCAFC), a program that supports family members who care for injured post-9/11 Veterans. She is a co-investigator on the NIA/NIH CARE IDEAS R01 study examining outcomes among care partners and persons with cognitive impairment and dementia (Vince Mor, PI) and on an R01 called "Informal Caregiver Burden in Advanced Cancer: Economic and Health Outcomes" (Siminoff and Matsuyama, Co-PIs).

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Raphael is a Associate Professorial Research Fellow at PSSRU at LSE and Deputy Director of the Centre for Health Service Economics and Organisation (CHSEO) at the University of Oxford.

At PSSRU, he leads a programme of research on financing long-term care, which aims to make projections of demand for long-term care for older people and associated expenditure to 2041. He also leads research on direct payments in residential care and on community care for older people and leads modelling work for the MODEM study on care for people with dementia.

At CHSEO, he leads research on trends in emergency hospital admissions of older people and on economic issues in assets based approaches to health. He was for many years a Senior Economist at the Department of Health, where he led a team of DH analysts providing analysis on social services and mental health services.


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