Bleddyn Davies – författare

First published in 1986, Matching Resources to Needs describes the PSSRU’s community care approach and analyses the first of the community care projects, a seminal set of experiments in the care of the elderly at high risk of institutional long-term care. The experiments create field structures which provide incentives to improve efficiency, decentralised power over resources being balanced by enhanced accountability. The first part explains the approach, analyses the causes of inefficiency in ~British social care, and reviews British and American evidence about the relationships between resources, recipient characteristics and outcomes. The approach is compared with some two dozen American experiments hitherto unknown in the UK. It describes the design of the project and its evaluation. The authors then examine the experimental results. They show that cost and welfare effects are better and the costs of outcomes are lower for recipients of community car. The third part of the book uses observational and other data to explore the relationships between structures, assumptive worlds, causal processes and outcomes and their costs. It also analyses the performance of the core tasks of entrepreneurial case management for types of case. The book concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of this approach to community care.

First published in 1986, Matching Resources to Needs describes the PSSRU’s community care approach and analyses the first of the community care projects, a seminal set of experiments in the care of the elderly at high risk of institutional long-term care. The experiments create field structures which provide incentives to improve efficiency, decentralised power over resources being balanced by enhanced accountability. The first part explains the approach, analyses the causes of inefficiency in ~British social care, and reviews British and American evidence about the relationships between resources, recipient characteristics and outcomes. The approach is compared with some two dozen American experiments hitherto unknown in the UK. It describes the design of the project and its evaluation. The authors then examine the experimental results. They show that cost and welfare effects are better and the costs of outcomes are lower for recipients of community car. The third part of the book uses observational and other data to explore the relationships between structures, assumptive worlds, causal processes and outcomes and their costs. It also analyses the performance of the core tasks of entrepreneurial case management for types of case. The book concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of this approach to community care.

In 1980 old people comprised over half the clients of Local Authority Social Services Departments and accounted for about half of their resources, yet until then residential care of the aged had been a backwater of both research and practice. During the 1970s a large research literature had developed on the subject, particularly in the United States. However, studies had been partial in their focus on issues, making no attempt to draw together their arguments to create a model that described and evaluated competing theories about what it is that determines the quality of residential life. Originally published in 1981, Bleddyn Davies and Martin Knapp filled that gap in this book.

The authors discuss not only the theoretical arguments about residential care and the degree to which those theories had been verified by research, but also how far the factors considered to be important had been successfully measured, considering the choices to be made between alternative varieties of care that had grown up so rapidly in the previous five years. The authors conclude with an analysis of how their approach should contribute to the discussion of issues that was to be faced by British policy-makers in the 1980s as our welfare systems attempted to cope with the increasing numbers of the very old.

In 1980 old people comprised over half the clients of Local Authority Social Services Departments and accounted for about half of their resources, yet until then residential care of the aged had been a backwater of both research and practice. During the 1970s a large research literature had developed on the subject, particularly in the United States. However, studies had been partial in their focus on issues, making no attempt to draw together their arguments to create a model that described and evaluated competing theories about what it is that determines the quality of residential life. Originally published in 1981, Bleddyn Davies and Martin Knapp filled that gap in this book.

The authors discuss not only the theoretical arguments about residential care and the degree to which those theories had been verified by research, but also how far the factors considered to be important had been successfully measured, considering the choices to be made between alternative varieties of care that had grown up so rapidly in the previous five years. The authors conclude with an analysis of how their approach should contribute to the discussion of issues that was to be faced by British policy-makers in the 1980s as our welfare systems attempted to cope with the increasing numbers of the very old.