Faculty Webinar - Social Care Trials with Professor Mike Robling

In this webinar, Prof Mike Robling will look at the role of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in evaluating interventions in social care settings, both child and adult. The webinar will look at how RCTs fit into evaluation frameworks that span early development work though to implementation stages. The value and importance of feasibility studies within this framework will be a key focus. Commonly applied models of RCTs such as individual and cluster trials will be introduced, as well as specific variants of these such as stepped-wedge designs.

The webinar will draw on several exemplar studies to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of using RCTs in social care. In doing so, challenges that are common across other evaluation designs will be identified, as well as those that are more particular to RCTs. Approaches to increase the viability and success of RCTs when working with social care populations will be explored including making greater use of existing administrative data, reducing burdens on lay and professional participants and locally led innovations to promote equitable and valid recruitment to trials.  

Professor Robling is Director of the Division of Population Health and Social Care at Health and Care Research Wales’ Centre for Trials Research. He is also part of the inaugural leadership team in the new Centre for Adult Social Care Research (CARE), an investigator with the CASCADE Children’s Social Care Research Centre and co-lead for Methodological Innovation in Public Health Science at  the Centre for Development, Evaluation, Complexity and Implementation in Public Health Improvement, DECIPHer. Professor Robling’s main research focus is evaluating complex interventions most notably in specialist home visiting.