Editorial: Voice and Influence of People with Lived Experience in Social Work Research and Publishing—Taking Stock and Planning Future Actions

This is the first Editorial of the Journal following our seminal issue 53(3), co-edited, led, and authored by people with lived experience of social work. We wish to review our actions to promote the voice and influence of people with lived experience within the BJSW to date and consider next steps to embed the voice and influence of people with lived experience within the Journal. This review and planning is done with reference to similar activities in other Journals within the broader field of health and social care. Work within the Journal to promote the voice and influence of people with lived experience started in January 2021, due to a shared vision by the Journal Editorial Team, Editorial Board and the Journal owner, British Association of Social Workers (BASW). Initially, we consulted with people with lived experience who are active in a range of social work research, practice and education initiatives. We explored with them what meaningful promotion of the voice and influence of lived experience within a social work journal may look like. The message was clear that people want opportunities to be involved in all aspects of Journal work—from its management, peer review of submitted papers, to opportunities to publish their work within the Journal. Proposal for the Special Issue on the Voice and Influence of People with Lived Experience was prepared by the Editorial Board members Dr Mel Hughes and Dr Peter Unwin and approved by the Editorial Board in July 2021. The issue was published in March 2023. Editorial for the Special Issue (Beresford et al., 2023) outlines the process of its creation, as well as lessons for future practice. The Editorial collective, comprised of people with lived experience of social work, social work practitioners and academics, signpost a range of relevant lessons. These include, for example, the importance of passion and commitment to such work, as well as importance of flexibility and awareness of complexity and power relations that may emerge. Resourcing—from funding to support the editorial work of people with lived experience to sufficient time to develop an issue—is equally important. The whole Special Issue, including the Editorial, is open access and a relevant read for social work practitioners, academics, students as well as people with lived experience of social work and community members. BASW representatives on the Journal, Dr Ruth Allen and Dr Luke Geoghegan, ensured that this work has a budget, co-developed with the representatives of the Special Issue Editorial Collective. In parallel to the development of the Special Issue, the Editorial Team, with support by the Editorial Board and BASW, also recruited people with lived experience to the Editorial Board. Recruitment process was organised during the summer of 2022. Since January 2023, half of the Journal Editorial Board are people with lived experience of social work and social care. We shall now explore our next steps to embed the voice and influence of people with lived experience in the Journal. Our work to date aligns with similar developments in health, such as the Patients Included Charter for Journals (Patients Included, 2016). The charter, created for health-related publications, requires at least two patients being members of the Editorial Board, and patients serving as reviewers for papers submitted to the Journal. It also, however, requires patients to ‘routinely publish editorials, reviews, or research articles in the Journal as authors’ (Patients Included, 2016), as well as for the Journal to be open access. Whilst the Special Issue of the Journal is a step in the right direction, we commit to find ways to make work led or authored by people with lived experience part of our regular publishing practices going forward. This also needs to be reflected in the processes of knowledge production, which lays foundation for the work of the Journal. In the UK, past few years have seen the introduction of funding mechanisms for social work practitioner research, which include health research requirements for the so-called ‘public and patient involvement (PPI)’. Early lessons from practitioners who utilised such funding stress the importance of active engagement and collaboration with people who experience social work at all stages of a proposed research project (James and Romeo, 2023). In 2019, a UK-wide Public Involvement Standards Development Partnership (between the Chief Scientist Office in Scotland, Health and Care Research Wales, The Public Health Agency in Northern Ireland and the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research in England) published the Standards for Public Involvement in Research (UK Public Involvement Standards Development Partnership, 2019). The standards focus on six areas of work (working together, inclusive opportunities, support and learning, communications, impact and governance). Stakeholders who use the standards are encouraged to reflect on their work, ‘to help manage expectations’ (UK Public Involvement Standards Development Partnership, 2019, p. 3) in relation to first steps to public involvement in research, everyday practice and ‘aiming high’ (UK Public Involvement Standards Development Partnership, 2019), for established and experienced groups. Previous to the standards, researchers were encouraged to review the nature of public involvement in health research using, for example, checklist tools to improve the reporting of the PPI, such as a GRIPP2 checklist (Staniszewska, 2017). The checklist includes requirements, for example, to report the aim of public involvement in the study, as well as clarity of methods used to ensure such involvement, and the extent to which public involvement influenced the study overall. In the British Journal of Social Work, this includes a reporting requirement for all the authors to explain how people with experience of health and social care were involved in the study. Beresford (2019), however, argues that, instead of checklists, the process of health and social care delivery needs to be democratised. This may require, for example, open and honest discussions about the above noted complexities and power differentials involved in research co-production or research run by people who have experience of health and social care. A relevant example is availability of funding and permanent, well-renumerated, work for people with lived experience within social work education, research and practice—as well as for practitioners themselves. As explored in the Editorial for the BJSW Issue 52(5), a lot of research published in the Journal focuses on the ‘lived experience’ of social work practitioners, rather than people who use health and social care services. This is hardly surprising if we consider the pressures and resource cuts in health and social care services over the past sixteen years. Nonetheless, whilst we need to understand practitioner experiences, decision making, as well as reasons to join, stay or leave the profession, we primarily need to base our research and practice on the needs of communities requiring different forms of health and social care support and/or experiencing poverty and marginalisation. Experiences and the identity of researchers, practitioners and people who use services alike need to be considered intersectionally (Bernard, 2021)—not least in an international and generic Journal that publishes research of relevance to social work, in the broadest sense. These are just some of many issues the Editorial Team and the Editorial Board will continue to consider as we explore ways to embed the voice and influence of people with lived experience in the Journal. This Editorial is an invitation to share with the Journal Editorial Team your ideas and suggestions for greater involvement of people with lived experience.

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