Research Podcast- Andrew Bateman

And the reason I sort of wanted to, to get you on to the podcast was talk about a particular project that you're working on called an incubator.

Yeah.

So how...

What is an incubator? How does that come about?

So, uh, part of the National Institute for Health and Care Research Academy is this concept of incubators for bringing on early career and new researchers, building capacity for clinical research.

Here at Essex, we're training social workers as well, um, and part of the backstory to our brain injury social care incubator was that we had a research study which was looking at the training of social workers on the topic of brain injury.

Mm-hmm.

And I think you may have spoken to some of my colleagues about, uh, the Heads Together study, and if not, maybe that's a topic for another day.

But-

[laughs] We will.

Cer- certainly in a previous podcast, check the link-

Yeah

... uh, I spoke to somebody from Brainkind about, um, people who suffer intimate partner violence-

Mm

... and often their first contact is with social workers who perhaps don't understand-

Yeah

... brain injury and how it might show itself and how it w- will affect the kind of behaviors.

Yeah.

That's a really good example of w- of the challenges that people living with brain injury experience, is that they're not recognized as brain injured and they're so-called victims of, uh, of these different, difficult situations, whether it's, uh, intimate partner violence or other forms of, uh, disadvantage.

So helping the social workers recognize that the brain injury is present in that scenario might influence the way they are able to support them.

So we, we did this, uh, training program in collaboration with Brain Injury Social Work Group.

That, that led to, uh, a resource package that's on the website.

Uh, and the team, uh, that, that worked on that.

Then we, we wanted to have a follow-on for the study, which was to build this network of, of people interested in social care after brain injury.

Mm.