| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
Bridging the divide
— elders and the assessment process | | Author(s) | Sally Richards |
| Journal title | The British Journal of Social Work, vol 30, no 1, February 2000 |
| Pages | pp 37-50 |
| Keywords | Needs [elderly] ; Evaluation ; Social Services Departments ; Interaction [welfare services] ; Case studies. |
| Annotation | At the heart of needs-based assessment is an uneasy tension between agency-centred and user-centred objectives. Using case material from an ethnographic study of the process of assessment for older people, this paper looks at what happens when practitioners try to understand the needs of individual elders through a process dominated by agency agendas. By marginalising the older person's insights, the risk of unwelcome or inappropriate intervention may increase. By contrast, a user-centred approach requires information gathering and provision that is meaningful to older people, and is sensitive to their efforts to analyse and manage their situation. These efforts are often revealed in narrative form as the person tells his or her story which, in an agency-centred assessment, is easily overlooked or even ignored. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-000411203 A |
| Classmark | IK: 4C: PF: QK6: 69P |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|