Health and social care

A carefully crafted study of ageing in Ireland, one of the countries hardest hit by the Eurozone financial crisis, presenting a critical analysis of ageing and social policy in a country under tight austerity measures.

This is the first book to explore the application of complexity theory to difficult practice issues in criminal justice and social work and brings together experts in this emerging field to address complexity theory from a range of perspectives, providing a detailed but accessible discussion of the key issues to whole systems approaches.

Through the perspectives of young people themselves, this book reviews changes in policy and practices that affected the generation of young people who grew up in state care in China during the last 20 years.

This book offers a unique analysis of the challenges facing contemporary social work that considers the multi-faceted threats to the profession. It provides in-depth reflections on the future of social care practice and solutions for students and practitioners.

Lessons from child protection errors and mistakes in 11 countries in Europe and North America are drawn together in a stimulating study from leading researchers in the field. By comparing and contrasting impacts, responses and responsibilities, it deepens understanding of how child protection systems fail and points to ideas for risk reduction.

This book explores issues central to contemporary theoretical debates around the nature of trust, linking abstract concerns to empirical analysis with interviews with service-users, practitioners and managers.

Understanding street-level bureaucracy gathers internationally acclaimed scholars to provide a state of the art account of theory and research on modern street-level bureaucracy, filling an important gap in the literature on public policy delivery.

This wide-ranging book is one of the first texts to deal with adult social care as a distinct entity and is an up to date source on contemporary government policies, debates and research.

With contributions from a range of experts across OECD countries, this book examines changes in long-term care systems throughout those countries, discussing and comparing key changes in national policies and examining the main successes and failures of recent reforms.

This book offers a new approach to scrutinising the co-existence of both care and abuse in relationships. Discourse analysis is introduced as a method of investigating relationships, policy and literature in informal care and analytic tools are considered alongside case-studies to illustrate how both parties construct their relationship.

A critical examination of the contradictory ideas and practices that have shaped community development in the US and the UK. It exposes a problematic politics that have far-reaching consequences for those committed to working for social justice.

This insightful book discusses the origins and theoretical underpinnings of family led decision making and brings together the current research on the efficacy and limitations of family group conferences into a single text.