Textbooks, monographs and policy-focused books on our Health and Social Care list push forward the boundaries of teaching, theory, policy and practice. The list covers areas including global health, health inequalities and research into policy and practice.
Key series include Transforming Care which provides a crucial platform for scholars researching early childhood care, care for adults with disabilities and long-term care for frail older people, and the Sociology of Health Professions, offering high-quality, original work in the sociology of health professions with an innovative focus on their likely future direction. Our leading journal in the area is the International Journal of Care and Caring.
Health and Social Care
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Globally public services have changed cultures and behaviours more akin to commercial sectors and citizens are no longer passive consumers but empowered individuals who expect state (and non-state) agencies to provide more personalised services and choice increasingly through a wider range of providers. Increased performance requirements and rising citizen demands have led many organisations to develop innovative service delivery mechanisms.
The author argues that creating public and social value is an essential part of a comprehensive approach to transforming and continuous improvement of modern governance and effective public services delivery in response to wicked issues. Relational partnering is the key to achieving public and social value, as it facilitates long-term relationships between public, private voluntary, third sector organisations and other stakeholders.
For many place leaders inequalities in deprived communities can only be addressed by developing integrated and targeted commissioning of local authority services in partnership in response to budget cuts and escalation of vulnerable groups with complex needs.
This book focuses on the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic currently dominating the agenda of global, national and local policymakers, from the perspective of the UK. This major public health crisis presents a threat which is impacting adversely on global economic structures, and exacerbating a number of pre-existing wicked issues. These interlinked issues include climate change, racial justice, austerity, housing and homelessness, employment, domestic abuse, human trafficking and modern slavery.
Health and socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been exacerbated by central government-imposed austerity budgeting by local authorities and the health service.
This book, part of the Social Determinants of Health series, extends the ideas developed in the previous volumes by reviewing the impact of COVID-19 on local and national governance from the perspectives of public health, social care and economic development.
Drawing on case studies from across the UK and beyond, it explores the pandemic and other ‘wicked’ issues including climate change, homelessness, unemployment and domestic abuse through the lens of relationalism, and proposes necessary system changes.
This chapter explores the wicked issue of domestic abuse and the complex challenges faced by those providing support to people affected, including victim survivors, children and perpetrators. It has long been known that domestic abuse is an impossible issue to address. Decades of changing political agendas combined with austerity have not only meant that legislation, funding and strategic frameworks have not reflected frontline work and the needs of communities in relation to domestic abuse, but have created barriers to addressing the root cause of domestic abuse, which is so often the root cause of all other types of abuse. This chapter identifies the roles of, and relationships between, sectors and organisations in addressing domestic abuse, and argues that partnership and a coordinated community response from strategic through to local levels are the only true way to address domestic abuse.
Local government, weakened by ten years of funding reductions, was significantly financially challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic; the financial effect is estimated at £10 billion for 2020–2021 (or 20 per cent of net revenue expenditure). The consequences of the pandemic comprise reduced income, increased costs from supporting local recovery, and potentially, systemic financial failure, challenging the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities as steward of the local government finance system.
Economic development as a local function has seen major funding reductions and the local growth landscape is complex, with government continuing to announce new funding streams to support business and to ‘level up’.
The overarching question is whether the local government finance system is itself still viable with its weaknesses exposed by the pandemic and how far it is enabling local government merely to survive.
This chapter introduces the role of employment policy and employment support. Employment support brings with it a number of complex interactions with public health policy and provision. This goes beyond simply what the public sector does through Jobcentre Pluses, but also sees crucial (and now well-developed) roles for the private and charitable sectors in training, placing and developing those who need work. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and those lessons that come from it, this intersection between public health and employment support will require further examination by researchers. Issues of health and safety at work have needed radical rethinking since 2020; the scandalous state of adult social care in Britain will also require huge investment in that sector’s workforce, both in terms of the quality of the sector’s skills base but also in recruiting the numbers needed. The role of local authorities in both of these areas, and others, is crucial. This role is explored in this chapter after a first section that provides a historical mapping of employment support policy and provision. A third section then draws focus onto a subject of contemporary importance for employment support: the UK ‘Shared Prosperity Fund’.
This book focuses on the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic currently dominating the agenda of global, national and local policymakers, from the perspective of the UK. This major public health crisis presents a threat which is impacting adversely on global economic structures, and exacerbating a number of pre-existing wicked issues. These interlinked issues include climate change, racial justice, austerity, housing and homelessness, employment, domestic abuse, human trafficking and modern slavery.
In England, over the last 15 years, social care spending on reactive services for children (including child protection and services for looked after children) has increased exponentially, with nearly two-thirds of councils reporting their 2018/2019 children’s social care budget was insufficient to meet actual levels of demand and spending (LGA, 2019). In order to meet these financial pressures, many local authorities have had no option but to cut non-statutory preventative and early intervention services. This has led to massive reductions in critical infrastructure, services and programmes that support the growth and development of children and young people.
Giving children the best start in life has been embraced by many organisations, especially local authorities and local partnerships such as health and wellbeing boards. The pandemic exposed these inequalities, further exacerbating the disadvantage and vulnerability for many children. How we respond to this crisis will either help or further confound the situation.
There is an urgent need for targeted and resourced plans to ensure all children are supported to get over the negative effects of the pandemic. Children paid a huge price in ensuring the pandemic did not result in greater numbers of deaths and even greater demands on health services. It is important, and in line with both intergenerational and redistributive justice, that the price they paid and the associated consequences are made a priority in COVID-19 recovery and future plans. Time will tell whether enough attention, effort and resources have been directed towards giving children the best start in life.
Contemporary housing policy over the last 40 years has clearly and repeatedly failed. Safe, secure and appropriate shelter and housing are key factors in the social determinants of the health and the distribution of health inequality. The complex multidimensional influences that housing has on health and wellbeing have been exemplified and exacerbated by the annual winter homeless crises, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for long-term social and economic policies to avert the climate crisis.
The aim of this chapter is to provide a high-level strategic review of housing policy and identify the key drivers and mechanisms currently facilitating, enabling or contributing to the delivery of housing, shelter and accommodation in the UK. It questions whether these drivers are facilitating the achievement of appropriate goals and ambitions for the future of housing and suggests they are impeding, frustrating or inhibiting progress. England needs a radical change to both housing policy and housing delivery.
This chapter explains how improving social outcomes after the crises of the past 15 years, the Great Recession, austerity, Brexit and COVID-19, has led to a more relational partnership between the public and private sectors. The thread that ran through these years and which has set the political priorities for the next decade was Britain’s widening socioeconomic inequality. In rejecting austerity as a solution to eliminating the public finances deficit caused by COVID-19 the Boris Johnson administration set out to stimulate public–private partnerships to deliver social value as part of a renewed focus on public spending targeted at those areas most affected by previous austerity cuts. The challenge for both public and private partners is how to adapt to the more flexible, relational culture implied by the new priorities.
