Abstract
Summary This article details how social work with older people is disappearing whilst also being supplanted by seemingly more cost-effective forms of intervention in the UK. This has included the use of higher numbers of unqualified staff in roles once completed by qualified social workers, alongside highly rationed interventions that utilise fewer staff or associate welfare professionals, including those drawn from health care. Findings Such reforms represent important changes embedded within neo-liberal inspired professional discursive practices. These include the biomedicalisation of ageing and associate narrow gaze interpretations of social care needs that privilege pathology and risk. For social work there has also been an ongoing retreat from older adults within communities: from care-managed and personalised support to the extension of ‘risk averse’ safeguarding and promotion of personal autonomy for users and informal care. Rather than represent a break with the past, such socially constructed and politically motivated reforms remain part of longer held societal and ideological trends. Importantly, these include assumptions that older users remain a peripheral concern in contrast to other social groups or needs. Applications The article concludes that the social work profession needs to articulate its distinct role with regard to its capability to provide substantive support to an ageing population, alongside its capacity to look beyond a narrow and unsustainable focus on rationing or the endorsement of self-support, treating illness and controlling risk.
Highlights
Social work for older people is gradually disappearing in the UK
Despite offering rhetoric to the contrary, the policy initiatives and reforms of the neo-liberal inspired New Labour (19972010) and Coalition governments (2010-present) in the UK Britain indicate a presumption that many core tasks and responsibilities fulfilled by social workers can be provided just as effectively by unqualified staff, or welfare professionals in allied sectors such as health care or education (Rogowski, 2010)
Core policy initiatives such as “personalisation”1 or Sure Start 2 have omitted a clearly defined or tangible role for qualified social workers (Lymbery, 2012); and activities once monopolised by professional social workers such as assessments of need or care planning are shared with associate professionals in other sectors, or are disseminated or franchised out to auxiliary or voluntary staff
Summary
Findings: Such reforms represent important changes embedded within neo-liberal inspired professional discursive practices. These include the biomedicalization of ageing and associate narrow gaze interpretations of social care needs that privilege pathology and risk. Rather than represent a break with the past such socially constructed and politically motivated reforms remain part of longer held societal and ideological trends. These include assumptions that older users remain a peripheral concern in contrast to other social groups or needs. Applications: The article concludes that the social work profession needs to articulate its distinct role with regard its capability to provide substantive support to an ageing population alongside it’s capacity to look beyond a narrow and unsustainable focus on rationing or the endorsement of self-support, treating illness and controlling risk
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