Nadra has been involved in the field of social care for over 36 years, initially as the registered manager of her services. She has been Chairman of National Care Association since 2001 and recently stepped down as a Trustee of Parkinson's UK in October 2018. Nadra is the Co-Convenor of the Cavendish Coalition which was set up to represent the Health and Social Care issues during the Brexit negotiations. She is a member of a number of advisory committees in the Department of Health and Home Office, including a number at Ministerial level, and served on government Taskforces. Nadra has recently been working on parts of the Green paper and the Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill. She holds various positions within voluntary organisations, delivering services to vulnerable people in the community and in 2006 was awarded the OBE for her services to Social Care. Nadra is also a Kent Ambassador and Deputy Lieutenant of Kent.

Jennifer’s interest in social care research stems from her own interest in health research as a patient with a long term condition requiring ongoing secondary care and her role as carer to her late father who used social care services. Jennifer is the Independent Ethics Lead for RDS London and also Chair of the Public Advisory Group and Decision Maker for the Enabling Involvement Fund. She has been working in research ethics for over 10 years, is visiting lecturer teaching at KCL medical and dental schools. She was a founding member of the Marie Stopes Research Ethics Committee (REC). She is currently Vice Chair of an NHS REC and Deputy Chair of the Save the Children Research Evaluation Ethics Committee which reviews international humanitarian aid research.

Sara is Professor of Work, Gender & Regulation in the School of Management at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia. She is Director of the Centre for People, Organisation & Work in RMIT College of Business. Much of Sara’s recent research has focused on paid care work. She is currently co-investigator on an Australian Research Council project ‘Markets, Migration and Care in Australia’, led by Emeritus Prof Deb Brennan (UNSW). Sara leads an ARC project ‘Decent Work & Good Care: International Approaches to Aged Care’ and is co-investigator on a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project ‘Imagining Age–Friendly “Communities” within Communities: International Promising Practices’ led by Prof Tamara Daly (York).

Matthew works as a National Officer for the UK’s largest trade union UNISON. UNISON serves more than 1.3 million members. They represent full-time and part-time staff who provide public services, although they may be employed in both the public and private sectors. They represent members, negotiate and bargain on their behalf, campaign for better working conditions and pay and for public services.

Margaret is a Project Manager – Evidence and Impact at Skills For Care. Margaret have done most of the research and evaluation work linked to workforce development over the past 25 or so years. Over the last 5 years she has worked closely with the Standards, Learning, Qualifications and Apprenticeships team on a whole range of projects consulting on what is available or needed in terms of workforce development in the adult care sector and measuring the impact of learning and development on the workforce. Margaret also has expertise in developing instruments to measure employee job satisfaction and health and wellbeing.

Karolina has worked as a care worker for over 12 years. She is proud to represent the social care workforce as the CEO of the National Association of Care & Support Workers. She believes that everybody deserves outstanding care and that care workers should be expected to deliver care with respect and dignity only if they receive them themselves. The National Association of Care & Support Workers (NACAS) is a professional body for the social care workforce. NACAS represents the workforce on a national level and gives the workforce a voice that is essential in social care policymaking. NACAS campaigns for registration of social care workforce, vastly improved training frameworks, better pay and working conditions, and more respect and recognition of the highly skilled and demanding job that caring is.
Social media: @Nacas @KGerlich777

Lyn has 30 years’ experience of direct support, development and management roles in the health and social care sector. A significant amount of that time has been spent working with people who have learning disabilities in the self-advocacy movement including a spell as coordinator of the National Forum of People with Learning Disabilities. She is currently Development Lead for Learning Disability at NDTi (the National Development Team for Inclusion), a social change agency that works with communities, policy makers and health and social care professionals to enable people at risk of exclusion to live the life of their choice.

Teppo is Professor of Social and Public Policy at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He leads the Center of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare), which is funded by the Academy of Finland in 2018-2025. Teppo’s research analyses care policy from local, comparative and global perspectives. He has drafted new conceptual perspectives for the analysis of care policy, including the concepts of welfare municipality, weak universalism, dedomestication, demographic panic, care capital and care poverty.

Dr Sarah Markham is the patient representative for the ASCOT project. She is a long-term mental health service user who has benefitted from support from social workers as both an inpatient and in the community. Sarah is also a Visiting Researcher at the IoPPN, King's College London and her research interests concern risk assessment and management in secure and forensic mental health settings.

Allister McGregor is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and an Fellow of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) at the University of Sheffield, UK. He has written extensively on the concept of human wellbeing and methodologies for operationalizing it for public policy and practice. He is the leader for the overarching workpackage on ‘Care, Sustainability and Wellbeing’ which guides the development of a conceptual and analytical framework for studying wellbeing in care policy and practice, for the ESRC funded programme Sustainable Care: Connecting People and Systems.

Ann, who is now retired, was the Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent and the Department of Health-funded policy research unit in Quality and Outcomes of person-centred care (QORU) until 2013. She was also a founder member of the NIHR School for Social Care Research (SSCR), Professor of Social Welfare at the University of Kent, and is still a member of the Academy of Social Sciences. She led the programme of work that developed the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) and the early series of volumes of Unit Costs of Health and Social Care. Her research interests include the measurement of outcome, costs and quality in social care, housing and care of older people, and economic evaluation of social welfare interventions, including criminal justice. She is a trustee for the Elderly Accommodation Counsel.

Clark is an Economic Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care. His work focusses on understanding the drivers of demand for adult social care services and developing the evidence base for investing in health and social care. In his previous role at the Health and Safety Executive he co-authored several research reports, most recently the Costs to Britain of Work-related Cancer.

Helen is a retired teaching assistant with Literacy specialism, and have a degree in English and American Literature from the University of Kent. Previous work included working as a secretary in London for private banks. She has 10 years’ experience looking after her parents, initially her mother who had dementia and more recently her elderly father. Also, Helen worked as a research advisor on the Measuring outcomes of care homes (MOOCH) project for researchers at University of Kent.