Review

Care and development

Putting the Community into Community Care: Report of a Conference
John Armstrong and Paul Henderson (eds)
Community Development Foundation, 1992

This booklet is aimed at staff in social services departments and health departments, and attempts to help them look at the way they interact with local communities. Its central thesis is that community care ‘should be rooted in the activities and networks of the community as a whole’. The contributors point out that the community development perspective is singularly lacking in the government push towards community care. The emphasis is on individual rights, and targeting resources on the most needy, not on increasing and supporting the capacity of local communities to care.

The booklet is made up of three sections (divided into 12 short chapters) covering the keynote speeches, the discussion groups and the workshops. The contributors include carers, community workers, academics and a director of social services but no representatives of disability groups.

Unfortunately, considering the extremely important nature of the material presented, it suffers badly from being a conference report. Most of the contributions are bitty and do not read well.

The strongest chapters are from John Armstrong who looks at why community development workers have had so little impact on the planning of community care, and what they could have to offer, and from Joyce Moseley, director of social services in Hackney, who gives an insight into the real problems of putting the community into community care into practice, when faced with the pressures of reorganisation and cost-cutting.

The booklet does raise many important and fundamental issues which are all but ignored in government policy-making. But it would have benefited from far stronger editorial control.