Making an IMPACT in adult social care reform
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In the lecture “Making an IMPACT in adult social care reform” on 18 February 2026, Professor Jon Glasby focused on a widely recognised problem: the distance between what is known and what is done. Drawing on his background as a social worker and his current role as Director of IMPACT, Glasby framed this gap as a failure of implementation rather than research. While social care is increasingly well researched, he argued, far less attention has been paid to how evidence is taken up and adapted.
IMPACT (‘Improving Adult Care Together’) was established to address this problem directly. It is a UK-wide centre designed to support the implementation of evidence in adult social care across the four nations. To bridge the gap between what is known and what is done, IMPACT’s approach is based on three main pillars: good evidence, good implementation, and bringing the two together in practice.
The centre works with three different forms of evidence: research, lived experience, and practice knowledge. This approach challenges familiar “hierarchies of evidence” that place some methods and voices above others. For Glasby, evidence debates in social care cannot be treated as purely technical. Questions about what counts as evidence, and whose evidence carries weight, are also questions about power. Lived experience and practice knowledge, he suggested, need their “volume turned up.” They are frequently treated as less credible than other forms of research, though they can be essential for understanding what social care is like in reality.
This commitment is operationalised through a strong orientation to co-production. Drawing on a definition from the Social Care Institute for Excellence, Glasby described co-production as a way of working in which professionals, people who draw on care and support, and unpaid carers work together as equal partners towards shared goals. In IMPACT, co-production runs through the centre’s design and practice. Lived experience is built into staffing (just over half of staff have lived experience of adult social care), into governance through leadership structures, and into dedicated advisory arrangements spanning the UK.
As well as this focus on evidence and voice, IMPACT is also concerned with what social care has often lacked: practical support for implementation. Glasby suggested that many people in social care already encounter policy guidance and growing amounts of research; the persistent challenge is translating this into real change. Training and quality improvement are therefore vital. Implementation becomes a distinct kind of work requiring specific skills, including coaching, organisational development, leadership support and change management.
IMPACT uses a particular delivery model, with four main mechanisms. Impact Demonstrators focus on strategic change issues, supported by senior improvement coaches embedded in local systems for sustained periods. Impact Facilitators support single-organisation change, again through practical involvement. Impact Networks bring together multiple local groups working on the same practice issue over a defined period, with a structured feedback loop that allows learning to be shared and adapted across sites. Finally, the centre’s “Asking Pack” work synthesises evidence into accessible, directly usable guides.
A distinctive feature of Glasby’s account was the emphasis on “national embedding.” IMPACT, he argued, aims to ensure that what is learnt can be built into adult social care across the UK. This involves relationships with policymakers, regulators, professional bodies, and training organisations. Embedding, in contrast to dissemination, integrates what has been learnt into the routines and infrastructures that shape everyday practice. At the same time, Glasby cautioned that embedding is never purely linear. Working across the four nations requires attentiveness to different contexts and political realities. Windows of opportunity can open and close quickly, and the ability to act may depend on being sufficiently connected and trusted to enter the conversation at the right moment.
From IMPACT’s work, Glasby suggested a set of themes as building blocks for the future of adult social care. These include strengthening voice, choice and control; supporting people to stay healthy, connected and well at home (a broader and more person-centred understanding of prevention); building on the strengths of people and communities; and integrating around the person and their life rather than around organisational structures.
Running through the presentation was a consistent message about change in practice. Evidence, Glasby argued, rarely delivers a single answer that can simply be “rolled out.” More often it generates better questions and provides resources for co-creation. Likewise, implementation is an ongoing process. Progress is more likely to happen when evidence is connected to people’s intrinsic motives and values (why they entered care work, what outcomes matter). In that sense, evidence becomes a tool for achieving the aims that people already have.
Glasby presented IMPACT as an attempt to take implementation seriously in a sector where the barriers to change are not only technical but structural, cultural, and political. By treating evidence as plural, by centring co-production, and by investing in practical implementation and embedding, the centre aims to narrow the gap between knowledge and action. The ambition is to build a social care system that is more able to learn.
The discussion following the lecture revealed some of the practical constraints within which adult social care operates. A first set of questions returned to what it means, in practice, to be “guided by evidence” in a field where evidence does not necessarily provide definitive answers. Several contributions then focused on long-standing problems in adult social care and the risk that these may persist, regardless of how strong the evidence base becomes. Concerns were expressed specifically about long waiting times. One participant asked whether, in thirty years’ time, the sector would still be talking about issues such as long waiting lists.
Glasby acknowledged that evidence-based tools can fail, especially when used too rigidly. Evidence should be used to open up dialogue with scope for adaptation in local contexts. He illustrated this with the example of a tool which initially appeared ill-suited to a hospice context, but proved valuable when staff worked with its underlying principles rather than applying it directly. On the longer-term and structural questions, he acknowledged that problems can re-emerge even after reforms are thought to have addressed them, and that progress is often uneven rather than linear. He also stressed the importance of joining up initiatives, arguing that implementation work can add value. Even so, the discussion underlined the tension at the heart of the seminar: implementation support can strengthen the use of evidence, but it operates within a system where capacity and resources remain uncertain.
