Enabling the Quality of Care for Older People

Jason L Powell*

Received: November 20, 2018;   Published: November 29, 2018

DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2018.11.002115

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Abstract

There has been a raft of research recently on the care of older people. Many of them take a theoretical approach and many take a policy approach. These books are huge in scope and a survey of them would suggest they are comparative mainly in the United States and United Kingdom. For many years, ageism prevented books from being written on older people because of the intense interest of children by practitioners. This is not to deny the importance and significance of that group of people at one end of the life-course. Historically, to suggest “age” instantly meant younger people added to the marginality and invisibility of older people. Worse, because there were hardly any widely subscribed postgraduate courses in social work in working with older people, with the overwhelming focus on children, there were periodic episodes of inhumanity against older people (known today as “elder abuse”). It was a forgotten dimension that older people were people. There was also a chronic shortage of research and knowledge for careers, families, health and social work professions on the vulnerabilities of older people whether if they lived at home or lived in a care home. Peter Townsend wrote his devastating overview of “care” in his famous book “The Last Refuge” (1959) that care homes were not necessarily benevolent institutions, but ‘warehouses’ were care was in chaos as careers did not have the enough skills, knowledge and practice to work with older people.