Redefining community care social work: needs or risks led?

Abstract

This reflective paper assesses whether the focus of community care social work is shifting from responding to needs to reducing or containing risks. Whilst public response to unacceptable risk has instigated major developments in health and welfare services and an overt concern with risk management is a key feature in elder abuse and mental health work, notions of risk have featured less explicitly in the community care literature. This paper suggests that community care assessment is increasingly concerned with risk management, as containing risks becomes a means of rationing scarce resources, when situations of high risk attract more resources than those where the risk is less. In addition, this emphasis on only the negative connotations of risk and the need for protection may constrain empowering service users to define their own positive risks.

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