Carey, Malcolm (SAGE, 2016-05-01)
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 biomedicalization of ageing and associate narrow gaze interpretations of social care needs that privilege pathology and risk. For social work there has also occurred 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 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 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.
Carey, Malcolm (Routledge, 2019-01-15)
This chapter examines some ethical and political challenges generated by the increasingly complex needs of an ageing society upon social work. It concentrates on the UK as a case study and critically evaluates related age-graded policies and practices relating to social work and care. The chapter includes a discussion of the on-going tensions between social diversity within an ageing society and the shrinking of formal care provision, alongside the impact of professional codes of ethics.
Issues of Ageing, Social Class, and Poverty
Carey, Malcolm (Routledge, 2019-01-18)
This chapter examines some ethical and political challenges generated by the increasingly complex needs of an ageing society upon social work. It concentrates on the UK as a case study and critically evaluates related age-graded policies and practices relating to social work and care. The chapter includes a discussion of the on-going ethical tensions between social diversity within an ageing society and the shrinking of formal care provision.
Carey, Malcolm (SAGE, 2016-06-28)
This paper questions ongoing moves towards integration into health care for social work with older people in the UK. Whilst potentially constructing clearer pathways to support integration risks reducing welfare provisions for a traditional low priority user group, while further extending privatisation. Integration models also understate the ideological impact of biomedical perspectives within health and social care domains, conflate roles and undermine the potential positive role of ‘holistic’ multi-agency care. Constructive social work for older people is likely to further dilute within aggressive integrated models of welfare: which will be detrimental for meeting many of the complex needs of ageing populations.
The neoliberal university, social work and personalised care for older adults
Carey, Malcolm
This article critically examines the impact of the neoliberal university upon social work education and practice relating to older people. It appraises market-led pedagogical reforms, including of the training of social workers who go on to work with older adults, such in support of policies including personalisation. Influence is drawn from the work of Nancy Fraser (2019): specifically, her understanding of ‘progressive neoliberalism’, or the improbable fusion of free market ideals with the politics of recognition to create a rejuvenated hegemonic bloc. This theoretical framework is utilized to analyse the prevalence of emancipatory constructs such as empowerment, participation, anti-oppression, equality, choice and independence within acutely underfunded, bureaucratic, and risk-averse fields of social care and social work. While benefiting some older ‘service users’, it is argued that personalisation policy regularly disadvantages or excludes older people within fragmented adult social care sectors. Progressive neoliberalism has helped to promote policies which envisage participative self-care whilst more often excluding or objectifying older adults, especially those with higher level needs.