Middlesex University London · Doctoral chamber
A Professional Doctorate in Health and Social Care Research
Netvett is more than software. It is the live research site for a Professional Doctorate at Middlesex University London: a chamber of independent scholarly critique built explicitly to determine whether the Agency Replacement Strategy measurably improves workforce retention and continuity of care, or whether it does not. Findings are pre-registered, peer-reviewed, and open-access. Negative results are published in full.
Hypotheses
00
Cohort floor
k = 0
Observation window
0 months
Fields observed
0 metrics
Chamber posture · live
Supervisors, ethics, peer review, and a frontline community of practice all wrap the platform. Any of them can amend, suspend, or reject a claim.
Scene 01 · Netvett aim, plainly stated
Netvett was built to test a hypothesis that could reshape adult social care: if you route capital directly to a verified professional at a fair, life-changing rate, and hold every claim about the outcome to a doctoral standard of evidence, does workforce retention improve, and does the person we support see the same familiar face for longer? The chamber is here to answer.
I · Direct to the worker
Every hour a care organisation would traditionally hand to an external agency margin, Netvett routes to a verified professional in their own internal bank. The saving stays inside the care envelope; the worker receives a life-changing shift rate.
II · Verified once, deployed everywhere
Pro-ID is a sovereign, cryptographically signed credential the worker owns. Employers verify once. Regulators inspect once. Compliance is portable across every provider that adopts the ledger.
III · Every claim under scholarly review
The platform is the live research site for a Middlesex University London Professional Doctorate. Vendor claims are replaced with pre-registered hypotheses, peer-reviewed findings, and open-access publications, including negative results.
Scene 02 · Vendor claims aren’t enough
Scene 03 · So we submitted ourselves
A Professional Doctorate in Health and Social Care Research at Middlesex University London holds the platform accountable in a way commercial software has never been asked to sustain. The DProf is not marketing. It is a five-year commitment to state hypotheses in public, submit the study to ethics, gather data at doctoral rigour, and publish the findings whether or not they favour the vendor.
Institution
Middlesex University London
Programme
DProf · Health and Social Care Research
Study site
The Netvett platform (live production)
Ethics
MDX HSCR Sub-Committee · approved
Method
Mixed-methods · longitudinal · pre-registered
Publication
Open access · negative results included
Scene 04 · The chamber of critique
The chamber is what turns Netvett from software into evidence. Every hypothesis in the DProf must survive scrutiny from four independent constituencies before it becomes a public claim, and any of them can compel a change to the platform if the evidence demands it.
Independent academic oversight
Named faculty at Middlesex University London hold the researcher accountable to the DProf programme rubric. Every quarterly report is challenged in supervision before any external claim is made.
Protocol review + amendment gate
The Middlesex University Health and Social Care Research Ethics Sub-Committee reviewed and approved the study protocol. Any change to the data model, cohort, or measurement instrument requires a formal amendment.
External journal scrutiny
Findings are submitted for peer review before Netvett cites them in commercial materials. If reviewers reject a hypothesis, Netvett re-runs the analysis, or retracts the claim.
Frontline advisory circle
A standing panel of registered managers, nurses, care assistants, and family carers reads every proposed change before it becomes product. The chamber is not academic in isolation. It is grounded.
Scene 05 · The doctoral hypothesis
The DProf tests four falsifiable hypotheses against a matched pre-Netvett cohort inside every consenting care organisation. The two anchor claims, workforce retention improves and continuity of care improves, are the questions this chamber exists to answer. If the data does not support them, the chamber will publish that too.
Pillar 01 · Workforce retention
When shifts route direct to a worker at £20/hr on the Pro-ID rail instead of £14/hr through an agency intermediary, 30-day, 90-day, and 365-day placement survival improves against a matched pre-Netvett cohort.
Measurement
30/90/365-day survival curves compared to organisation baseline; ANOVA on retention deltas; qualitative exit interviews on stated reason for leaving.
Pillar 02 · Continuity of care
Values-based matching + a persistent Pro-ID that a person we support learns to trust improves the continuity-of-carer index (proportion of care hours delivered by the same familiar worker over 12 weeks) versus the pre-Netvett baseline.
Measurement
Continuity-of-carer index per person we support · same-worker proportion week-on-week · family and PWS satisfaction scored on a validated instrument.
Pillar 03 · Capital recapture
When capital that would have been extracted as agency margin is redirected inside the care envelope, providers demonstrate measurable weekly savings without raising per-shift employer cost.
Measurement
Weekly agency spend avoided (delta between historic agency rate and Pro-ID rate × hours booked) · variance across provider tiers · attribution audit.
Pillar 04 · Regulatory posture
Providers who mount the Sovereign Regulatory core (Care Log · CQC Five Key Questions engine · Physical VERA vault) improve their evidence readiness against an inspection projection modelled on the CQC Single Assessment Framework.
Measurement
Weighted-average pillar posture per branch · evidence signal density · inspection-projection accuracy vs actual inspection outcomes on the study cohort.
Every pillar is pre-registered on the Open Science Framework and observed over rolling 12 · 24 · 36-month windows. No cherry-picking. No cross-sectional snapshots. The chamber demands time series.
SIG · 0xHYPO-VScene 06 · Method & ethics
This is the audit trail. Consent, pseudonymisation, observation, analysis, amendment. Nothing skipped, nothing hidden. Anyone in the community of practice can trace any published claim back to the exact protocol version and cohort that produced it.
§ 01
Care organisations opt into the study cohort through an explicit ethics-approved consent journey. Workers are consented individually with the right to withdraw at any point without penalty.
§ 02
Every telemetry field crossing into the research repository is pseudonymised at source: rotating SHA-256 salt, k = 10 minimum cohort, no identifier ever transported alongside a health field.
§ 03
Retention, continuity, capital and regulatory metrics are observed over rolling 12 · 24 · 36-month windows. No cross-sectional cherry-picking; the chamber requires full time series.
§ 04
Statistical analysis is pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. Draft findings are submitted for external peer review before Netvett cites them commercially. Negative results are published in full.
§ 05
When a supervisor, ethics committee, peer reviewer, or community-of-practice member challenges the study, an amendment is logged, reviewed, and either accepted or rebutted in the audit trail.
Cohort floor
k = 10
No aggregate ever released below 10 people; rotating SHA-256 salt prevents cross-linkage.
Ethics
MDX HSCR approved
Amendment protocol required for any change to instrument, cohort, or data model.
Pre-registration
OSF · public protocol
Hypotheses committed publicly before analysis begins. No HARKing.
The pseudonymisation note, DPIA extract, and ethics packet are indexed under /docs/phd/ in the platform repository and shared with supervisors on request.
SIG · 0xMETHOD-VIScene 07 · Publication commitment
The chamber commits, in writing, that every hypothesis in the DProf is published, whether the finding favours Netvett or not. If the Agency Replacement Strategy fails to improve retention, that failure is the paper. This is the guarantee that turns a study into evidence.
Open-access venues only
No paywalled results. Every paper is free to read from day one.
Pre-registration on OSF
Hypotheses, instruments, and analysis plans committed publicly before data collection.
Code + data appendix
On thesis defence, the analysis code and the anonymised dataset are released to the research community.
Negative-result guarantee
Findings that reject a hypothesis are published in the same venue as findings that confirm it.
Timeline · outputs
Year 01
Milestone 01
Interim report
Retention + continuity delta on the founding cohort. Open access. Ethics extract published alongside.
Year 02
Milestone 02
Mid-viva submission
Doctoral supervisors examine methodology; interim findings tested at conference.
Year 03
Milestone 03
Thesis + defence
Full mixed-methods thesis: An Agency Replacement Strategy for Adult Social Care.
Rolling
Milestone 04
Practitioner briefings
Skills for Care · CQC · Directorate briefings translating findings for the sector.
Scene 08 · Supervisory bench
Principal investigator
Dr Olawale Amodu
DProf candidate · Netvett founder · protocol author
Doctoral supervisors
Middlesex University London faculty
Health and Social Care Research programme
Ethics chair
MDX HSCR Ethics Sub-Committee
Protocol approval + amendment gate
External examiner
To be appointed at viva
Independent post-thesis defence
Community of practice
Registered managers · nurses · care assistants · family carers
Advisory circle · pre-publication review
Chamber seal · MMXXVI
Knowledge for testing, not for selling. This is the doctoral posture the platform has enrolled itself under. Every claim, every metric, every dashboard on Netvett is answerable to the chamber above.
Sealed by the Netvett Directorate · witnessed by the Middlesex University London chamber