Dr Sarah Brand

Research Fellow, CASCADE at Cardiff University

Sarah is interested in understanding how we can transfer learning and ‘best practice’ from one social care setting to another. This is a real challenge for social care because the local characteristics of each setting will change how and whether a given service or intervention will work.

Sarah has worked for CASCADE since 2018, previously working as a researcher for Y Lab Wales and has many years’ experience working in social research, developing and evaluating complex health and social care interventions. Sarah uses ideas from the natural sciences about the properties and processes of complex systems and applies these to social care. She uses realist approaches to help her to build understanding about what the key ingredients are that make an intervention work for different families, and what social workers need to do to tailor services to a family’s circumstances.

Sarah is keen to work with practice to develop and use evidence to support social care to have the most positive results for children, young people, and families. She has a particular interest in partnership working with social workers and social care decision-makers to create evidence in a form that is most meaningful for informing change in practice.