20 Exploring the difference made by Support at home > Yorkshire: Care in the Home service in East Red Cross services in five locations across the Yorkshire UK were selected to take part in the study. This selection was based on a number of essential > Wales: Swansea Floating Tenancy Support variables of interest, including geography – to Service ensure coverage in the four countries of the UK; continuation of contract funding past March > Northern Ireland: Care in the Home service in 2012; size of service; and type/aims of service – the Southern H&SC Trust to try to reflect the range of different Support at home services on offer.9 The five locations selected > Scotland: Neighbourhood Links & Red Cross as our case study sites to be explored Buddies in the Scottish Borders. in the evaluation were: > London: Next Steps service at King’s College See Appendix B for further details of these Hospital individual services. 3.2.2 Participant sample After the service users’ initial service assessment, the service teams sought consent for the research to be conducted. Service users were fully briefed on the purpose of the study in order for them to decide whether they would like to participate. We interviewed 90 people before their service had begun. The needs and demographic profile of our evaluation participants are described in section 4. Sixty one interviews were achieved with these service users after their receiving the service (following attrition). In an attempt to boost the number of interviews, some one-off retrospective interviews were conducted in evaluation locations where the ‘before’ cohort numbers were originally low. Table 1 illustrates the interviews conducted 10 in this study. Table 1: In addition, 58 semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with stakeholders across the five locations, including Red Cross staff (22), Red Cross volunteers (24) and referrers (12). TABLE 1 NuMBER OF SERVICE uSER INTERVIEWS BY SITE LOCATION11 London Yorkshire Wales N. Ireland Scotland Total Pre 32 32 14 9 3 90 Post 20 25 9 5 2 61 Retrospective – – 21 5 9 35 10 The length of the fieldwork period differed across the sites according to capacity and other factors, hence, more interviews were achieved in some locations than others. In general, the pre-service interviews were 9 The sites were chosen for their differences and so will reflect many but conducted by the service team and the post and retrospective interviews not all of our services across the country. Services providing personal were conducted by the research team. However, in London, the pre- care were excluded and no A&E based services are represented in the interviews were also conducted by the research team. 5 sites in this study.