Equality and Diversity is an important dimension of modern society, and of current social policies. Explain and illustrate this statement with reference to age, using one area of social policy.

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Roll No @ 00211029                Social Policy

Equality and Diversity’ is an important dimension of modern society, and of current social policies.’  Explain and illustrate this statement with reference to age, using one area of social policy.

In a society as diverse as that of the UK, everyone has a right to be treated equally regardless of their age, cultural beliefs or gender.  The New Labour Government defines equality as inclusion and allowing people to reach their potential (Walsh, Stephens & Moore, 2000).  The current state of social care has been an increasingly pressing subject for policy makers due to the looming demographic shift and budgetary pressures (Wiener et al, 2002).  Older people are the largest group of users of care services and Age Concern (1990) highlight that as we now spend almost a third of our lives at retirement age, discrimination and inequality is inexcusable.    This assignment will consider New Labour policies aimed at creating equality for older people and highlight whether changes made to the way in which people can receive services help to create greater equality for this diverse group.

Along with the Labour Government came a number of policy initiatives attempting to address equality issues in the health and social care sector.  Daly (2002) discusses that social care has a wide variety of policy measures at its disposal such as services in kind, cash payments to the user or service and benefits for carers.  This illustrates the differentiation of the areas that policies can target to create equality for older people and also factors that can enable the current system to deal with the complexities and diversity of modern society (Walsh, Stephens & Moore, 2000).

 

Care in the community was initially spurred by New Right ideology, escalating costs of institutional care and a shift of responsibility from the state to the individual and family (Walsh, Stephens & Moore, 2000).  The current emphasis of New Labour policies has been independence, choice and wellbeing, which is stressed in the ‘National Service Framework for Older People’ (DH, 2001a).  The framework targets discrimination, quality of care and the promotion of a healthy, active lifestyle in older age in a bid to make services more equal and considerate of diversities in this group of users as well as to contain costs by reducing the need for more expensive services through prevention.  Tanner (2003) argues that New Labour policies have the same ideology underpinning them as the New Right mentioned above, but use a different emphasis to their advantage.  Words such as “independence” and “empowerment” are hard to contest and it is put forward that this allows the state to justify themselves in taking a step back.  This can be backed up by a decrease in the number of households purchasing home help services instead relying upon informal care (National Statistics, 2003)

 

A major problem of the interpretation of new policies can be the definition of independence itself.  There can be vast difference between what the Government deems to be independence in a policy context to what older people feel and want this to mean for them (Ungerson, 2004).  In addition to this independence is a difficult aspect of performance to evaluate.  Baldwin (2002) criticises the current performance indicators and targets to measure the heavily promoted idea of independence.  The government have classed independence of older people in these targets to be “a reduction of emergency admissions to residential care”.  In a society with policies that should be creating equality for older people, such a narrow perspective of independence could have very limiting effects on them as a group.  

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When it comes to the interpretation of needs, Tanner (2003) discusses that people want help not care yet it is becoming increasingly common for social services to take over duties where previously health care was concerned, meaning that there is little time left for workers to address the social aspect of the needs of the clients such as help with household duties (Netten, 2005).   As a result of this, people are increasingly resorting to purchasing their own services to meet their needs or relying on informal carers (Bernard & Philips, 2000).  This creates significant inequality in the provision ...

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