Summary
Contents
This book is a quick and accessible reference guide to the key concepts that social work students and professionals need to understand to be effective. The authors place practice at the center of the text, and include a host of case examples to bring the concepts to life.
Examining the essential topics of the social work curriculum, the concepts covered relate to practice, theory, policy and personal challenges. Further reading is included in each entry, so that the reader can explore what they have learned in more detail.
This book will be an invaluable resource for social work students during their studies and on their practice placement. It will also be useful for qualified social workers, who want to continue their professional education.
Care Management
Care Management
Definition
The term care management is linked more to adult care than children's, and was introduced via the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 (Brown, 2010), in conjunction with concepts such as service user choice, needs led assessments, a mixed economy of care, costing, and care in the community. Social work and nurse managers for the first time were given devolved budgets, and asked to cost care in units of hours or days (Netten and Beecham, 1993). Prior to this, services were largely ‘in-house’ with little or no costings required by social work staff. With this new budgetary responsibility, social workers were asked to devise ‘care packages’ which required more detailed assessments of service user and carer needs, to formulate individual care plans ...