Social Policy

The run up to the full implementation of the 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act in April 1993 witnessed such a plethora of guidance from the Department of Health and the Social Services Inspectorate that, at times, it was difficult to keep track of publications, let alone to find time to reflect on wider conceptual issues or to follow developments in practice. This being so, it is refreshing, just over a year on, to concentrate on a number of recent articles which do just that. Kerry Caldock, Policy and practice: fundamental contradictions in the conceptualisation of community care for elderly people? Health and Social Care, 2 (1994), 133-141. Kerry Caldock's contribution focuses on conflicting understandings and expectations about community care for older people. The paper updates discussion of the notions of'community' and 'care'. To the enduring nature of the rhetoric and reality of community -as reassuringly dense networks versus a single female relation -Caldock adds the growing perception of communities as hostile environments. It is a perception arguably as much created as sustained by daily media reports. Likewise, the continual use of the term care, in addition to the focus on needs, has the effect of perpetuating the negative construction of older people as a dependent problem group. The irony is that the provision typically offered to older people still constitutes services rather than personal care, which many reject. Of course, the separation of these two elements is not clear cut, as my own research has shown (Warren 1991 But, using Janet Askham's ideal-typical definition of the terms, Caldock shows how the renaming of'packages of care' as 'packages of services' may benefit older people by encouraging a view of support as a right, rather than the reverse

Action (physics) · Content (measure theory) · Internet privacy · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Sciences and Governance

• New Directions in the Sociology of Health

  Lynne E Lonnquist, Pamela Abbott et al.•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1991

  Añadir item