Social welfare & social services

The government's NHS Plan emphasises the importance of services users' views. This report provides practical guidance on how to ensure that older people's views are heard, acted on, and monitored, in relation to service quality. It makes recommendations for ensuring that older people's views become an integral part of home care service provision.

This report investigates the circumstances, needs, views and life experiences of black young people with caring responsibilities. It highlights significant gaps in service provision, which result in young people undertaking caring responsibilities, and makes recommendations to improve services.

The principle of service user involvement in decisions that affect them directly is now generally supported, but many voluntary organisations remain under scrutiny because of slow implementation. This report explores the processes of change in eleven voluntary organisations to draw out lessons relevant to the wider sector.

Help the Aged funded this major study because of concerns that older people living in private rented housing were vulnerable to abuse and harassment by landlords. Drawing upon detailed research with older people, professionals and landlords in six different localities, the report provides the first major study of this important issue.

This best practice guide to providing information for users of multi-agency services for disabled children is an invaluable resource for professionals, parents and carers.

This report presents the findings of the first ever national survey in the UK, in which nearly 600 parents took part and which looked at the needs and circumstances of minority ethnic families caring for a severely disabled child. The quantitative survey was then compared with data on the circumstances and experiences of white families.

This timely report considers how childcare services are meeting the needs of parents working atypical hours.

Community participation is now demanded of virtually all public sector services and programmes. This handbook provides practitioners, community activists, regeneration managers, teachers and academics with the tools needed to ensure that it is effective.

This report explores the problems and opportunities presented for child protection workers responding to child abuse that occurred in the context of violence towards the child(ren)'s mother. It provides good practice examples for overcoming the traditional difficulties in this area.

This new and updated edition will be welcomed at a time of significant change within social services. It offers a legislative framework for each area in practice, in addition to practical guidelines for implementing this legislation. Case studies and material used by existing schemes are included.

Drawing on interviews with older people, local authority care managers and direct payments support service workers, this topical report looks at how older people use direct payments and how they make them work.

A document of the results of road-testing two frameworks for assessing community participation: Active partners: Benchmarking community involvement in regeneration (Yorkshire Forward, 2000) and Auditing community participation: An assessment handbook (The Policy Press, 2000).