Care of Older People in the Community.

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Care of Older People in the Community.

In this essay I want to carefully examine a broad range of issues concerning elderly people in contemporary British society today. In particular I will want to focus on community care policy and the issue of long-term care. I will want to pay attention to informal care and be able to assess how problematic that this form of care can be in contemporary society. I will also suggest changes that could be made in social policy that could help advantage retired and elderly people in this the twenty-first century.

Community care policies can be traced back to the 1950's in British society and had grown as a result of the closure of large-scale institutions that had housed people with mental health problems and the mentally handicapped. This led to the emergence of smaller type homes and hostels for people who could not return to their own homes (Dalley, 1996). With improved medical facilities that had developed during and after the 2nd World War it was thought that mentally ill people could be treated outside of these institutions and in the community.

A good definition of community care can be found in the 1989 White Paper on community care, Caring for People, which stated that "community care means providing the right level of intervention and support to enable people to achieve maximum independence and control over their own lives. For this aim to become a reality, the development of a wide range of services provided in a variety of settings is essential. These services form part of a spectrum of care, ranging from domiciliary support provided to people in their own homes, strengthened by the availability of respite care and day care for those with more intensive care needs, through sheltered housing, group homes and hostels where increasing levels of care are available, to residential care and nursing homes and long-stay hospitals for those for whom other forms of care are no longer enough" (Department of Health, 1989, p.9).
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The issue of long-term care had become a controversial issue since the late 1980's and early 1990's when problems began to arise in respect of who was responsible for providing the funds for long-term care. This was quite a frustrating time for elderly people needing care and for their families as they had to go through financial assessment and faced the prospect of losing valuable assets such as the family home under the new funding regime that had emerged in April 1993 under the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act.

In the run up to the General ...

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