Community Integrated Care Team Up With FACT For A Special Performance

An international artist and one of Britain’s biggest and most successful charities have teamed up to host a unique dramatic production in Liverpool next week (Tuesday 23rd October), exploring the future of social care. This event is part of a significant cultural programme developed with major employers across the Liverpool City Region, exploring how employment may change in the decades ahead.

Community Integrated Care has collaborated with Britain’s leading arts and technology institution, FACT (Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology), to deliver a creative research programme with artist Hwa Young Jung. The insight developed through this programme will be brought to life at a Night of Social Care Improv, an improvised performance taking place at 81 Renshaw Street on Tuesday 23rd October (7.00pm).

Developed as part of FACT’s The Future World of Work research programme, which sees eight international artists take part in residencies in some of the regions’ most prominent employers. This creative study responds to estimates that 50% of all current jobs in the Liverpool City Region will no longer exist within the next 20 years, with economic change and the advancement of technology. However, the social care sector – as a profoundly human industry, is forecast as one of most future-proofed against the growth of automation.

The Event

A Night of Social Care Improv will adapt role play methods on stage to unveil hypothetical futures for work in learning disability and mental health support – exploring both opportunities and challenges for the future, reflecting the tipping point that the sector faces right now and the era of uncertainty that follows. With the programme covering technology, human rights, funding and community engagement, it will explore many of the big issues for the care sector from a unique angle. Uniquely, audience members will have the opportunity to participate in the production, giving them the chance to directly experience what life may be like people who access or deliver care in the future.

The production has been shaped following a three-month residency, which saw Hwa Young Jung spend two months working in Community Integrated Care’s specialist services, alongside people they support, their families and staff.

Actors participating in the programme have lived experience that helps them relate to the characters in the production, and the event will be assisted by people who are supported by Community Integrated Care. With the public in attendance, along with local MPs, academics, artists, care leaders and people who access support, it is hoped that the event will share valuable insight and create a much-needed discussion.

This project will go on to be exhibited at the Liverpool based gallery, FACT, in 2019. Research from the project will support Community Integrated Care and FACT to develop new products and innovations to enhance the care sector.

Community Integrated Care

Community Integrated Care is one of Britain’s biggest and most successful health and social care charities. It supports over 3500 people across England and Scotland who have learning disabilities, mental health concerns, autism and dementia, employing 6500 staff nationally. It was founded in the Liverpool City Region thirty years ago and remains one of the region’s biggest employers and care providers.

Martin McGuigan, Executive Director of Innovation at Community Integrated Care, says: “The social care sector plays a vital role in society today, so it is important that we can explore how it might change, develop and innovate in the years ahead.

It has been an exciting opportunity to have an artist spend time with people at all levels of our organisation to review how they perceive both the challenges and opportunities for the future, and to bring this to insight life in such a creative way. This production will be engaging, entertaining and inclusive, and I am sure that everyone will leave the event feeling inspired and respecting the value of high-quality, person-centred care.”

Hwa Young says: “I chose to deliver my residency within social care because I believe that it is overlooked as a sector. Social care work takes place in personal and domestic settings, which makes it a very distinct working environment. Through the residency I wanted to understand why people go into social care and was interested in exploring how young people will enter the sector in the future.

Art allows us to envision a different future. Developing the work from people’s lived experiences and presenting it to the public in a theatre setting, we are highlighting the crucial personal interactions of being a good care worker. I hope that by getting the general public to participate in the event, they gain a better understanding of working in social care.”