According to Mandelstam (2005), community care is about services and assistance for vulnerable people in society, such as elderly people, people with disabilities, chronically ill and mental health problems or with problems caused by harmful use of drugs or alcohol. Primary responsibility for community care rests with local social services authorities.
Community care services stand for helping people who need care and support to live in the community and to avoid social isolation. The main aim in providing community care services is to enable people to remain living in their own homes and have as much independence as possible. Community care services are provided by local authority social services.
The origin of community care goes back to
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Firstly, that was the result of social changes and political utility; secondly, it helped to move away from the isolation in the asylums as a mentally ill person into the community. BBC News suggested of treating and caring for physically and mentally ill people in their homes rather than in an asylum. National Health Service & Community Care Act came into force in 1990, when politicians agreed that old, Victorian asylums were no longer appropriate and suitable to treat mentally ill patients …show more content…
That time major changes needed in the health system. The old health system was ineffective, it used too much money; therefore, the support needed to be cut back. The deinstitutionalisation was also an important step from the government. By this time the whole society agreed that mental ill people need to take care of themselves; therefore, they should be put back into community and let them live the normal life (Walsh M., 2000).
As stated by Fraser (2009), Mrs Thatcher started a radical programme. Despite the massive founding which the NHS received, there were persistent concerns about waiting lists, the unequal geographical distribution of health care that still had a significant social class implication and the need for a more effective and efficient service. The NHS was the biggest employer in Britain and was characterised by many of the producer culture inefficiencies if the state bureaucracies of the Welfare State. She brought into force the mixed economy of care, which have several advantages. There are greater choice for service users, more cost-effectiveness and a better quality of services. The system has also disadvantages, as geographical unevenness, more administration and bureaucracy
As a result of the lack of regulation in state mental institutions, most patients were not just abused and harassed, but also did not experience the treatment they came to these places for. While the maltreatment of patients did end with the downsizing and closing of these institutions in the 1970’s, the mental health care system in America merely shifted from patients being locked up in mental institutions to patients being locked up in actual prisons. The funds that were supposed to be saved from closing these mental institutions was never really pumped back into treating the mentally ill community. As a result, many mentally ill people were rushed out of mental institutions and exposed back into the real world with no help where they ended up either homeless, dead, or in trouble with the law. Judges even today are still forced to sentence those in the latter category to prison since there are few better options for mentally ill individuals to receive the treatment they need. The fact that America, even today, has not found a proper answer to treat the mentally ill really speaks about the flaws in our
The 1930s was a tough time for all of the mentally ill people. They were not treated the way that they do now. The mentally ill were called names like satans child, or they were not expected or very frowned upon in many religions. So because of all of the people who were mentally ill they started to create asylums. With these asylums they could hold almost all of the mentally ill people during that time. All of the asylums were overcrowded and sometimes there would be around 1 million patients. WIth all of the people in these asylums the staff and doctors became very understaffed so the patients living within the asylums were not treated how they should have been. Then doctors had found ways that they thought could cure these mentally ill people, whether it would be cruel to them or not. The treatments ran from major brain surgery to taking baths for multiple days.
The fight for improved health care for those with mental illness has been an ongoing and important struggle for advocates in the United States who are aware of the difficulties faced by the mentally ill and those who take care of them. People unfortunate enough to be inflicted with the burden of having a severe mental illness experience dramatic changes in their behavior and go through psychotic episodes severe enough to the point where they are a burden to not only themselves but also to people in their society. Mental institutions are equipped to provide specialized treatment and rehabilitative services to severely mentally ill patients, with the help of these institutions the mentally ill are able to get the care needed for them to control their illness and be rehabilitated to the point where they can become a functional part of our society. Deinstitutionalization has led to the closing down and reduction of mental institutions, which means the thousands of patients who relied on these mental institutions have now been thrown out into society on their own without any support system to help them treat their mental illness. Years after the beginning of deinstitutionalization and after observing the numerous effects of deinstitutionalization it has become very obvious as to why our nation needs to be re-institutionalized.
Mental illness has been around as long as people have been. However, the movement really started in the 19th century during industrialization. The Western countries saw an immense increase in the number and size of insane asylums, during what was known as “the great confinement” or the “asylum era” (Torrey, Stieber, Ezekiel, Wolfe, Sharfstein, Noble, Flynn Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill). Laws were starting to be made to pressure authorities to face the people who were deemed insane by family members and hospital administrators. Because of the overpopulation in the institutions, treatment became more impersonal and had a complex mix of mental and social-economic problems. During this time the term “psychiatry” was identified as the medical specialty for the people who had the job as asylum superintendents. These superintendents assumed managerial roles in asylums for people who were considered “alienated” from society; people with less serious conditions wer...
The Open University (2010) K101 An introduction to health and social care, Unit 3, ‘Social Care In The Community’, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
The Care Programme Approach Association, (2006) National Standards and CPA Association Audit Tool for the Monitoring of the Care Programme Approach. Chesterfield: CPAA
The NHS was then finalised during 1948, the main role of the NHS was to reduce health inequalities throughout Britain, so that everyone could be treated the same way, whatever their finance stability, job status and location. They believed that this programme should have reduced inequalities throughout Britain. It was created by Aneurin Bevan and Edwin Chadwick but it was successful until the Prime Minister at the time who was Margaret Thatcher accepted the Bill through Parliament. The NHS included the Public Health Acts such as maternal and child welfare, availability for beds in hospitals and General Doctors in local areas. The NHS also included things such as Vaccinations and Immunisations and social work skills such as home helps and also
The BBC documentary, Mental: A History of the Madhouse, delves into Britain’s mental asylums and explores not only the life of the patients in these asylums, but also explains some of the treatments used on such patients (from the early 1950s to the late 1990s). The attitudes held against mental illness and those afflicted by it during the time were those of good intentions, although the vast majority of treatments and aid being carried out against the patients were anything but “good”. In 1948, mental health began to be included in the NHS (National Health Service) as an actual medical condition, this helped to bring mental disabilities under the umbrella of equality with all other medical conditions; however, asylums not only housed people
Another focus for change is that over the years the demand for home and community care over hospital care has continued to grow, as stated by the Queens nursing institute “Recent health policy points to the importance of improving and extending services to meet the health and care needs of an increasingly older population and provide services which may have previously been provided in hospital within community settings”.
Yiu, L. (2012). Community care. In L. Stamler & L. Yiu (Eds.), Community health nursing: A Canadian perspective (3rd ed., p. 213, 219, 227). Toronto, Canada: Pearson Canada Inc.
an assessment of their community care needs under the NHS and Community Care Act 1990.
In the nineteenth century the United States had established hospitals to house and care for the chronically ill and mentally ill. Several individual states assumed responsibility for mental hospitals in the 1980’s. At the beginning of the twentieth-century mental health treatments proved to have limited efficacy. Many of these patients received custodial care in state hospitals. New psychiatric medications were developed and introduced into state mental hospitals in 1955 as a result of the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).The medicines that were developed brought new hope and addressed some of the symptoms of mental disorder. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy enacted the Community Mental Health Centers Act. This accelerated deinstitutionalization.
Continuing budget cuts on mental health care create negative and detrimental impacts on society due to increased improper care for mentally ill, public violence, and overcrowding in jails and emergency rooms. Origins, of mental health as people know it today, began in 1908. The movement initiated was known as “mental hygiene”, which was defined as referring to all things preserving mental health, including maintaining harmonious relation with others, and to participate in constructive changes in one’s social and physical environment (Bertolote 1). As a result of the current spending cuts approaching mental health care, proper treatment has declined drastically. The expanse of improper care to mentally ill peoples has elevated harmful threats of heightened public violence to society.
Tonks, A. (1994). ‘Community Care: The First Year: Community care in Northern Ireland: a promising start’. British Medical Journal. 308 (1). Pages: 839.
In this essay I will analyse the origins of Community Care and what benefits emerged when the NHS Community Care Act 1990 was established. Later on, I will explain and critically evaluate the effects of privatisation in social care and health.