EBOOK: Co-ordinating Community Care

Book excerpt: An exploration of how people from different professions and agencies work together to meet the health and social needs of people in a community. It is about making the most of different skills to meet people's needs and creating satisfying and supportive working groups. It is the details of making community care a reality. The effectiveness and quality of care a person receives depends on getting the right professionals and services, and also on the support given to the person's carers. Services must be co-ordinated if the person is to benefit, but co-ordination is more difficult with the increasing change, variety and complexity of health and social services in the 1990s. This book challenges the assumptions that services are best co-ordinated by multiprofessional and multi-agency teams, and that community care teams are broadly similar. It demonstrates when a team is needed and how to overcome differences between professions, and between agency policies and philosophies. Drawing on ten years of consultancy research with a variety of teams and services, the author gives practical guidance for managers and practitioners about how to set up and improve co-ordination and teamwork. The book combines practical concerns with theoretical depth drawing on organization and management theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, economics and government studies.