This collection consists of evaluations of research-training events, knowledge exchange activities and impact of the practitioner research programme. There are significant challenges around improving, or even maintaining, the quality of health and social care for older people both in the UK and across many parts of the world. This project starts from the premise that in order to improve the health and social care for older people there is a need for a stronger evidence base for those designing or providing care, greater sharing of this evidence base and better use of this evidence to improve the lives of older people. One way of making a contribution across these dimensions is through moving towards the co-production of knowledge between academic researchers, those involved in designing and delivering care, and those receiving care. This is beneficial in terms of ensuring that the evidence produced around older people's care is directly relevant to the needs of those involved in providing or receiving care, and it ensures that those outside academia have better access, awareness and ownership of the research under production. This project seeks to contribute to our understanding of effective research use in practice and to improving care for older people by strengthening the use and usefulness of research to inform the design and delivery of this care. In order to achieve this, the project aims to: 1. Extend theoretical and practical understandings of the knowledge translation, brokerage and exchange processes that are effective between academics, users, policymakers and practitioners when sharing good practice in the production and utilisation of findings relating to the health and social care of older people 2. Improve the volume and quality of research created between those involved in delivering care for older people, older people receiving care and academics 3. Increase awareness of, and improve access to, research created by those involved in providing care for older people 4. Support greater engagement and collaboration between researchers and practitioners involved in researching and delivering care for older people across health and social care contexts. The need which underpins this proposal is twofold: first, there is a need to link more strongly the use of research evidence with policy and practice improvements in the care of older people. Second, we need to know more about how knowledge sharing, collaboration and engagement between those involved in the creation of research and those who are involved in providing services can be more effective, potentially utlising the practitioner research programme model. In order to achieve these aims set out above the project will involve the following activities: 1) Synthesising the evidence about improving research use by and usefulness of research for those involved in receiving or delivering care, specifically examining the role of practitioner research and building on learning from recent projects 2) An exploration of the research priorities of the project partners in developing and sharing research evidence on the care of older people 3) The delivery of a Practitioner Research Programme (PRP) to support the development of small-scale research projects led by those delivering care for older people and involving older people receiving care, academic researchers and knowledge brokers in the co-production and translation of this research. Programme delivery will include supporting networking, knowledge exchange and sharing between those individuals and organisation undertaking the research projects, and the promotion and dissemination of this research across wider national and international networks. 4) Sharing existing and emerging evidence about how to support and embed practitioner research activities, and methods of improving engagement and collaboration between researchers and those involved in delivering services for those who require support Project partners will be NHS Lothian,Scottish Care, Alzheimer Scotland, Glasgow City Council, and West Lothian Local Authority. This project brings together a team of academics, policy-makers, practitioners, older people accessing health and social care provision, and specialists in evidence-use in practice and knowledge media. Together we will draw together existing evidence and generate new knowledge and understanding about improving health and social care for older people, and embed the use of this evidence to then improve the lives of older people across Scotland. These benefits will be for academic, practitioner, policymaker and service user audiences.

We used contribution analysis to evaluate the PROP (Practitioner-Research: Older People) project at two levels: (1) the practitioner-research programme and (2) its impact on the use of research evidence in policy and practice at local health and social care organisations. Our contribution story begins with the individual development of the practitioners involved in the research programme. We suggest that the development of research skills and the experience of ‘doing’ research provides practitioners with expertise as a ‘researcher’ as well as a ‘practitioner’. In this way, they might be thought of as ‘boundary-spanners’. The second half of our contribution shows the use of practitioner-research to improve the use of evidence-based practice in partner organisations. We suggest that the practitioners’ use of engagement and knowledge exchange has increased organisational capacity for research use and made some initial changes to practice. In this way, they might be considered ‘knowledge-brokers’. We gathered a range of evidence about these activities, such as questionnaires, round-table discussions and group activities. We used ‘criteria for success’ to create benchmarks for impact from practitioners, mentors and steering group members. We also used questionnaires to generate evidence for the theory of change. In these questionnaires, we used open questions in order to create space for practitioners to share their experiences in their own terms. We also used closed questions, typically in the form of Likert-type scales, to show improvement over time. We have also included outputs from the project in our analysis including audio recordings of presentations, presentation material such as powerpoint presentations, and research reports. This data are informed and supplemented by our experience as designers and project managers of this programme of research.