Introduction

The focus of this chapter is the practice of people who work face to face with service users. Such practice is at the heart of social care. It is where the aims and ideologies of agencies and policymakers intersect with the lives, rights, needs and desires of service users. Practice describes the role of social care workers in relation to service users – how they work with them. Yet despite the importance of such practice and such practitioners, neither seems to have been central in discussions and developments relating to social care. The repeated message from service users is how important good practitioners can be, but how damaging poor practice is and how unreliable the quality of practice tends to be in current social care (Beresford et al, 2005; Branfield et al, 2005).

Issues relating to practice are spread throughout this book, because they are so key to any discussion of social care. In Chapter Four, we looked in detail at workforce issues, where constraints operating on the quality and nature of practice relating to lack of training and support emerged. However, as we have also seen, problems of funding and bureaucratisation and institutionalising regimes, also create barriers in the way of person-centred practice.

We know that the goal of person-centred support is to work in a way which focuses on the rights, wants and needs of individuals, taking its cue from them. It seeks to support them to achieve what they want from their lives, rather than fitting them into a narrow range of pre-set services.