The Shared Lives Incubator: Learnings Addendum
Shared Lives is a form of personalised social care for adults with disabilities, mental health conditions, or other needs which prevent them from living on their own.
It pairs these vulnerable adults with carers, who share their home and family life with them.
The Shared Lives Incubator was established in 2015 to incubate sustained delivery of quality Shared Lives care by providing social investment to develop and grow schemes in four different areas in the UK. The Incubator’s experience has revealed that while the development and growth of such personalised social care schemes is valuable for vulnerable adults, Shared Lives care in those areas has been more difficult to scale than anticipated.
In November 2019, the Incubator published a report to analyse these challenges to growth. This report described lessons and insights from the first four years of the Incubator’s experience in facilitating Shared Lives care. Since it was published, the Covid-19 pandemic and other key events have shifted the social care landscape and further impacted scheme growth.
This addendum piece discusses the extent to which barriers and growth factors have changed or remained the same.
