Day Centres
Day centres support the wellbeing and health of people with social care and support needs who want to live at home. Their staff and volunteers offer companionship, care and support. Centres have different purposes and support different groups of people.
Day Centre Resources Hub
We co-developed an online Day Centre Resources Hub with day centres for older people and their broader professional stakeholders. It aims to help support day centre sustainability by improving knowledge about them, supporting their operation, and encouraging joint working by providing useful information, practical tips, guides, case study examples and templates that can be downloaded and used to help inform work. Topics covered include research, outcomes and impact, marketing, recruitment and local examples. Resources are for day centre providers themselves and their external stakeholders - people in roles involving funding, planning, evaluating, referring or signposting to day centres, people who have local relationships with them, or who might consider engaging with them in other ways.
- Visit the Hub
- Read the blog introducing the Hub and why it was developed
- Day Centre Resources Hub flyer
We shared reflections on co-designing resources for day centres and their stakeholder at the British Society of Gerontology Annual Conference 2023.
Adult and older people’s day centres: priorities for research, development, and action
Our survey of day centre stakeholders gathered views about priorities for action, development and research with respect to adult day centres. Findings guided the development of our later work and prompted development of the Day Centre Resources Hub. Read our article about the findings.
Day centres for people who are homeless in south London: Response to the Covid-19 crisis
During the Covid-19 pandemic, day centres for homeless people remained open. Read our article about how these services operated as humanitarian assistance during a national emergency and the importance of strong local networks for this work.
Mapping publicly available information about day centres from four south London boroughs
In May 2021, our report – Caring in company: a pre-Covid snapshot of day centres in south London. Report of a mapping exercise of publicly available information from four south London boroughs – revealed how difficult it is to find information about day centres. With websites an increasingly important information source for us all, work is needed to make day centres more visible to those who may benefit from them.
Read the blog introducing the report.
Helping day centres to 'unlock lockdown' after the Covid-19 pandemic
Most day centres were required to temporarily close to regular users from March to July 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. As adult day centres are not a regulated service that tend to be invisible in guidance, in May 2020, we published Helping adult day centres to ‘unlock lockdown’, a two-part resource aimed to support managers, voluntary co-ordinators and staff, into the ‘new normal’ after lockdown ended.
Part 1 covers some of the practicalities of re-opening, drawing on other relevant guidance issued, advice, and action points for regulated settings, including childcare.
Part 2 prompts providers to reflect on what has happened, the process of moving forwards and any learning that could be helpful in the future.
Our guidance was reissued by the Social Care Institute for Excellence as guidance commissioned by the Department of Health and Social care, Delivering safe, face-to-face adult day care, and updated as new guidance was issued.
Read our blog discussing the re-opening of day centres.
Read our blog on the subject: 'Next steps for day centres in south London as they reset, rebuild and renew from the COVID-19 pandemic'
A day centre manager shared with the Day Centre Research Forum their experiences of reopening after Covid.
To find out more about day centres work, contact Katharine.Orellana@kcl.ac.uk.