Calling all EAS Practitioners in England!
You are being invited to express an interest in your Equine Assisted Service being included in a potential multi-site EAS study with Professor Ann Hemingway (Bournemouth University) and Kezia Sullivan MSc.
Many thanks to HETI & its members for supporting this research opportunity.
CLOSING DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31st December 2024
The project welcomes participation from all equine-assisted service providers (whether they are HETI members or non-members) who meet the following criteria:· Are keen to participate and actively engage
· Operate in England (not rest of UK, as the programme is specific to English policy)
· Have provided EAS services to at least 20 individuals under the “Troubled Families” or “Supporting Families” programmes (or county equivalent) anytime from 2015 onwards and / or ongoing
(NB This is a national policy program, and may be named differently in each county. You may need to contact your own local authority or commissioning organisations to confirm that your work was / is within these programmes)
Background from the HETI(UK) Autumn Forum
TheHorseCourse hosted the HETI(UK) Autumn Forum meeting in October at their Dorset centre. 26 people attended, representing 14 Equine Assisted Services (EAS) organisations. We had presentations from Professor Ann Hemingway and Kez Sullivan, and various research-experienced HETI members to get the juices flowing about how a study could be designed to test the benefits of EAS across multiple organisations and practices.
There was enthusiastic agreement about marrying hard numbers with personal stories from real participants, and commonalities were found in terms of the referrers, issues, outcomes and funders we work with. The group shared information about their beneficiaries and workloads and our follow up analysis showed that an area of commonality was the “Troubled Families”/ “Supporting Families” programmes.
This programme requires Local Authorities to collect data to track service user interventions and outcomes and this external data has been used successfully in Dorset for previous studies. Therefore, we are investigating the possibility of running a larger study, across multiple local authorities and multiple EAS providers. This has the huge advantage that outcome data for the study can be collected from the local authority in retrospect and anonymously, and that numerical data does not need to be collected directly from participants.
As part of the study design we will also include equine welfare measures and collect stories from service users to capture the voice of participants referred into your EAS services through these programmes. Please note that even if you no longer take referrals from these programmes, your service can still be included in the study as historical data.
If you would like to express an interest in your service participating, please fill out the survey linked here:The survey takes approximately 5 minutes to fill out, and you can withdraw at any time.
This does not commit you to participating – there will be many steps to take and discuss before any commitment is made on either side.