• Hospital discharge and the citizenship rights of older people: will the UK become a test-bed for Europe?

      Ford, Dierdre; Stepney, Paul M. (Carfax (Taylor & Francis), 2003)
      The authors are both experienced social workers and teachers in the field of community care. They draw on their UK and European experiences as well as the growing body of research on hospital discharges of older people to illustrate how citizenship rights and social justice cannot be upheld without ethical good practice in this field. Community Care in the UK now contains in-built tensions and potential conflicts between health and social services staff over continuing care. Entitlements and ethical considerations can be obscured by the economic interests of the agencies involved. These developments which are already evident in other European welfare states provide a warning to Eastern Europe about the dangers of importing managerial and market principles into the field of care for older people. Research evidence supported by case studies is used to illustrate how rights to health care and even human rights can be overridden when policies of cost containment combined with efficiency targets begin to shape decisions about care. Further, the recent proposal to fine UK social services departments 100 (140 Euros) per day for delayed discharge will only exacerbate the problem. The authors argue that research can provide guidance on the essential elements for good practice in inter-professional work, especially concepts of well-being that include justice, fairness, participation and autonomy to counteract the jeopardised citizenship of older people.
    • Mission impossible? Critical practice in social work.

      Stepney, Paul M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
      In recent years, the capacity of social work to be a force for progressive policy and social change has been significantly eroded. Social work in the UK has been re-branded and reshaped within New Labour’s modernized welfare state, only to become politically compromised and compliant: ‘the dog that didn’t bark’ even when its soul appeared to be stripped out. This article offers a response to this predicament informed by a structural modernist analysis revitalized by elements of critical postmodernism (Fook, 2002). Without wishing to offer any definitive prescriptions, the concept of critical practice is worthy of consideration, as it offers the potential for combining the role of protection with prevention whilst embodying possibilities for critical reflection and change. This became the focus of a recent conference organized around the theme of celebrating social work (Torfaen, 2002). Further, it offers practitioners a means for critical engagement with the issues that lie at the root of injustice and exclusion, to develop a more emancipatory approach, whilst resisting pressures for more enforcement and control.
    • The Quality and Ethics Connection: Toward Virtuous Organizations.

      Ahmed, Pervaiz K.; Machold, Silke (Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2004)
      Quality as a philosophy of management practice has become widely embedded in organizational mindsets. This paper looks at the fundamental theories of ethics and morality, and shows how these and a fuller consideration of these can lead to better practice of social responsibility through a higher platform of quality, which we call quality consciousness. The paper shows that business actions, and indeed the pedagogy of management theory, are not in themselves amoral. Rather, they are driven by a systematic reflection of the context. The paper develops the implication of this for the extension and strengthening of the concept of quality by delineating the definitional boundary of quality, and then scrutinizing the philosophy of quality and the philosophy of virtue and morality to examine conceptual inter-linkage and symbiosis. The paper promulgates a view of quality that explicitly incorporates virtue as part of the quality paradigm. The paper then charts how the rigorous incorporation of ethics and organizational morality can be made in quality management, and how this will lead to the next stage of evolution in quality theory and the role this new heightened sense will play in better managerial practice of corporate social responsibility. By critique, the paper develops a tentative framework to move toward the virtuous organization. This, the paper suggests, is the next stage of quality evolution.