Different Purposes in Human Service in General - Research Paper Example

This article discusses the problems associated with the term human services. There are many aspects to this problem. For instance, with the expanding world population, there are new demographics being created that must be included within the confines of human services for the term to be effective. Obviously in order to be able to talk about human service in general, we cannot allow for the term to exclude any sort of demographic, no matter how new. We cannot say we are referring to human services if in fact we are not talking about all humans in general. The other difficulty with the term human services is that there are so many different definitions of the term, none of which are fully accepted. From practitioners to scholars in the field, what is necessary to keep in mind is that different aspects of the term are used in reference to different purposes. The term then becomes this large nebulous concept of terms and definitions, and it becomes necessary to define which aspect of it in particular is being used in order for the audience to be able to understand what is going on. This just makes the whole term less effective as it has to be defined every single time it is going to be used. It is like developing a new term to refer to something every time, because if two different people had a different concept about the same thing, then they would be talking about two different things and miscommunicating if they were simply to refer to “human services” without completely defining what they meant. As we can see, a proper definition of the term is necessary in order for it to be effective at all. Works Cited Zins, Chaim. “Defining human services.” Journal of Sociology and Human Welfare, 2001, vol. 28, no. 1. Moral Boundaries: Care The author wishes to redefine the term care. As the author sees it, the term “care” is to far to the peripheral of human society. The way to move it to a more central location would be to redefine the term care with an attitude more towards human interdependence. Without such a re-imagining of the conception, then the term will continue to be less effective than what it could be, and moral and political boundaries will not be able to be redefined in such a way to improve the quality of human life. The most interesting part of this chapter was in the way it states that the current conception of “care” only further serves to exclude along the basis of class, gender, and racial lines. The idea that care is not universal currently around the world serves to suggest that people only deserve care if live in a country which provides universal health coverage or if they can afford to pay for health coverage. This conception leads people to believe that people are less deserving than others to receive the care that they need. If people believe that others less fortunate than them do not deserve the same kind of care, then it is easier to choose not to help others receive the car they need. In this it becomes such that people lose a sense of interconnectedness. What we needs to be done is to make everyone understand how interconnected we really are to everything that is going on around the world. If embedded in the language that we use is the justification for this sort of exclusionary practice, then there is no way for us to make the necessary changes. The author’s re-definition, though admittedly ambitious, is necessary for any sort of changes to take place. Works Cited Tronto, Joan C. “Care” in Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Healthcare. Routledge, New York. Policy is Personal: Sex, Gender, and Informal Care The author of this piece focuses on informal care and the extent to which the vast majority of informal care givers are female. The author find herself vastly interested in the role that care givers play, and the extent to which it affects people’s lives. For instance, the author’s mother was an informal care giver for her own mother, and watching this take place, she came to the realisation that she too would end up playing that role for her own parents. It is interesting to note that simply growing up in that environment that she became so acclimated to this simply being a way of life that there simply is no other option in her own mind. Also interesting is the extent to which the author assumes that care givers are overwhelmingly female. There is, of course, statistics to back this up. For instance, in a home which has an elderly person in need of personal, informal care, the woman of the household generally spent two to three hours per day performing tasks for the person in need of care while the man in the household spent an average of eight minutes. This was regardless of whether or not the women worked or not. This brings us to the question of why exactly men are so much less likely to put themselves of the position of caring for others than women. Is it societal standards? Is it the way they grow up with a woman raising them and a father working? To what extent would a man staying at home and caring for children while a woman worked change the perceptions of the children of the family? These are all parts of the question that the author was concerning herself in regards to informal care. Works Cited Ungerson, Clare. “Introduction: Policy is personal” in Policy is Personal: Sex, Gender, and Personal Care. Tavistock Publications, New York. The Theoretical Bases for Primary Group Networks The piece starts of discussing the widely accepted idea that our society is rather impersonal due to its size, the obviousness of the degree of the importance of primary groups is rather surprising. Furthermore, many of the groups that were thought to have replace primary groups are actually highly dependent upon primary groups for their survival. The author uses the mass media as a example; though people might consider the media as an example of the way that society has become faceless, due to media’s reliance upon homogenized content and the act that the media highlights the extent to which society has grown in general, informal primary groups make it possible for this type of entity to exist in the first place. People do not simply turn to mass media because they are only concerned with the extent of how the content affects themselves; they concern themselves with the extent to which the content of the news and such will affect their primary group. If it were a simple matter of people only being interested in their own affairs, people would to really need to turn to such a large outlet as the mass media. The author wishes to argue against the idea that society needs to either be focused on the impersonal, professional, utilitarian mode of society or the personal, informal, humanistic mode of society. Furthermore, he wishes to argue that the formal aspects of society are highly dependent upon the informal aspects of society, and that there can indeed be no formal aspects of society at all without the informal aspects of society. The author states that the main problem is how to maintain both of these contradictory models. Works Cited Litwack, Eugene. “The theoretical bases for primary group networks and formal organisations in modern industrial society” in Helping the Elderly. Guilford, New York. Orphans of the Living This article discusses a common theme that author noticed in all of his research on Homes: they were run like prisons for criminals who never committed a crime. Part of the reason for this was the time period during which the people who took part of the study grew up during. The children in Homes were considered to be contaminated to a certain extent. They came from homes of parents who were considered poor stock, and thus they were thought to be similarly ill-prepared for life. This was during a time in which eugenics was considered reasonable, so for these people it seemed only logical. They could not be cared for properly by their proper care givers, so it came up to the parents in these Homes to do so. Considering the opinions of the children held by those who ran the homes, it is not surprising that the children in these homes were treated like prisoners. The author then goes on to describe the various methods that were used to keep the children in line. For instance, most all of the children were made to feel fear. Fear was a tool used to keep the children in line, as though they needed to be in constant concern about their very security. As though these children were not already in fear enough after losing everything that was familiar to them, while some homes did not intentionally make use of fear tactics, others basically did utilise fear in order to keep children in line. Considering the traumatic events that could only have led these children to live in Homes, this further, intentional use of fear serves to integrate fear into a way of life for children. This would only serve to set up children to grow up into adults who also constantly lived in fear. Works Cited Penglase, Joanna. “Complete and austere institutions” in Orphans of the Living: Growing up in Care in twentieth-century Australia. Curtin University Books. Australia’ Welfare: Deinstitutionalisation This article discusses the concept of deinstitutionalization, which has expanded to not only include patients being released from mental health facilities but patients being released from in-home elderly, child, and disability care services, among others. The process is not typically simple, with a transitioning period being necessary for patients. While the official policies of deinstitutionalisation were some of the most widely debated and talked about, the outcome of these policies were not followed and studied to the extent necessary to determine the outcome of these policies. In order to adequately judge the extent of the effectiveness of these policies, obviously this gap in knowledge is going to have to be rectified. This chapter attempts to discuss the broad developments in the term ‘institution’ and furthermore does not attempt to define the term in one single manner, but it recognises the different uses in different settings and refers to these as such. A main aspect of the change that occurred in institutionalisation was when human rights were taken into consideration for those living in institutional setting. This was especially so when the United Nations determined that it needed to monitor patients of institutions and recommend reintegration of these patients back into society wherever possible in order to give these patients the highest standard of living possible. What brought even more attention to the human rights of patients in institutions were writings of former patients of institutions. These very human voices spoke out against some of the inhumane treatment they received and recommended policies to raise standards of living. Works Cited ----------. “Deinstitutionalisation: the move towards community-based cared” in Australia’s Welfare 2001. Australia Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra. Care Management and Health Care of Older People This chapter focuses on how assessment and care management have been put at the forefront of policy making. Policies are made from a from-the-top style, and they are made with this knowledge take into consideration as well. In discussing care management, we yet again come upon a term with a nebulous meaning that requires for us to specify which aspect of care management we are discussing for any sort of communication on the subject to be made in any sort of depth. Once again we discover the troubles of having loosely defined terms in discussing social issues. The problem comes from the myriad of different aspects of health care that the term refers to, and the extent to which this complicates the ideas surrounding it means that using the term simply complicates the matter more than clarifies it. The term case management attempts to draw one level of differentiation in regards to the concept of care management. There are several central ideas to care management that the author attempts to define. For instance, care management needs goals. Goals are to provide clients and care givers with more concrete ideas as to what they are working towards. Obviously care givers need to have specifically designed goals to work towards so patients can be officially considered released, if possible, from care. The way to meet goal is to define core tasks, which involves assessment, care planning, and case closure. What we need to always keep in mind is that care management always needs to be working towards something, such as the quality of life for long-term care management patients. Works Cited Challis, D., Darton, R., Johnson, L., Stone, M., Traske, K. “The Darlington Care Management Model” in Care Management and Health care of Older People. University of Kent, Canterbury. Understanding Care, Welfare, and Community This article discusses the conception of home and what it means to enter a person’s private residence in order to perform the tasks of one’s work. Not only do care givers have to adhere to professional standards on their visits, but they have to adhere to the etiquettes involved in being a guest in a person’s house. This process, entering a person’s home for the first time, is described as being an overly unsettling experience. Considering the wide variety of responses that people have to having people come into their homes, obviously care givers are not going to know what to expect whenever they come into a person’s house for the first time. These workers tend to be overly cautious at first, some even saying that they won’t go so fa as to get a towel or clothes out of drawers in order to stop accusations of theft before they have a chance to take root. Of course, there is also the aspect of becoming familiarised with a care giver to the extent of being on friendly terms. The most important thing to keep in mind is that care givers are there to perform a job, and as such they need to remain objective to a certain extent. Becoming overly familiar might lead care givers to become lax in their work and care standards if they feel like they are simply going over to an old friend’s house. While to a certain extent this might seem impossible to completely avoid, care givers need to remain as objective as possible in the home care environments. Of course, patients having home care workers into their private residences can be an unsettling event as well. There is a similar, reciprocal feeling of not knowing what to expect, and the reactions of patients surveyed to having care givers in home varied throughout many factors. Works Cited Bytheway, B., Bacigalipo, V., Bornat, J., Johnson, J., Spurr, S. “Carework and bodywork” in Understanding Care, Welfare, and Community. Routledge, New York. Contesting the Australian Way: Restructuring Community Services This chapter discusses the relationship between the state and civil society, and how both benefit reciprocally by an intense level of participation from civil society. The benefits of an intense economic boost, which is argued to be the main factor, are obvious. When people feel more connected in a society, they are more likely to participate within it to an extent to where all avenues of society benefit. The problem, of course, is to consider how this should be accomplished. Australia has had the advantage of being from its inception built around such policies as to accomplish this goal. Government figures encouraged and promoted a variety of private and community based initiatives to such, harboring a sense of connection throughout the communities through the government. Of course, the ways policies are made and changed are always in flux, as evidenced by the way this has been accomplished in Australia since the 1970’s. The biggest difference has been in the extent to which the government has attempted to make bureaucracies more democratic. The reformers of this time period attempted to improve the communication between the government and the community in order to improve consultation and accountability between the state government and the community. This, however, is harder to affect in practise than it is in theory. Various principles were imported from the private sector. The main aspect of accountability that people were concerned with was in regards to the size of the budget. Nobody wants fort here to be any amount of needless government spending. The question of reinventing the government was asked, though how to accomplish this is yet another question. Works Cited Brennan, D., “Government and civil society” in Contesting the Australian Way. Cambridge University Press. Coordinating Heath, Extended Care, and Community Support Services This article discusses the measures taken to increase cost-effectiveness in the health services field through increased coordination. In specific, the author examines how these concepts affect the areas of aged care and community services. Many of the changes in policy that are suggested or are being implemented have been tried elsewhere in different countries. As such, what we can take away from these is the extent to which these policies have succeeded or failed in various ways, and we can then use this knowledge to our advantage. Furthermore, the article argues that there has been improvement in major policy due to micro-economic reform. As such, the coordination has improved between various agencies and services that were at one point autonomous, increasing the effectiveness of such agencies. Of course, this has not been completely perfected and has room for improvement as well. Considering all of this, various reforms have been implemented specifically in the name of increasing coordination in care services. The main drive for an increase in coordination is to not only maximize current expenditures but to possibly cut them to an extent where the same care is given for less. New models of organization and administration have yet to become fully effective in this manner. The “Fordist” model of mass production has proved inadequate in the modern information age, and models based on the optimization of information have replaced these. This is one of the reasons that there has been a heavy emphases upon coordination. Works Cited Fine, M. “Coordinating health, extended care, and community support services: Reforming aged care in Australia.” Journal of Aging and Social Policy, vol. 11, 1999. Read More