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Bridging the divide: elders and the assessment process

Bridging the divide: elders and the assessment process
Bridging the divide: elders and the assessment process
At the heart of needs-based assessment is an uneasy tension between agency-centred and user-centred objectives. Using case material from an ethnographic study of the process of assessment for older people, this paper looks at what happens when practitioners try to understand the needs of individual elders through a process dominated by agency agendas. By marginalizing the older person's insights, the risk of unwelcome or inappropriate intervention may increase. A user-centred approach, by contrast, requires information gathering and provision that is meaningful to the older person and sensitive to their efforts to analyse and manage their situation. These efforts are often revealed in narrative form as the person tells their story which, in an agency-centred assessment, is easily overlooked or even ignored.
0045-3102
37-49
Richards, Sally
f8d8bdaf-5f92-4687-a25f-221caa304c6c
Richards, Sally
f8d8bdaf-5f92-4687-a25f-221caa304c6c

Richards, Sally (2000) Bridging the divide: elders and the assessment process. British Journal of Social Work, 30 (1), 37-49.

Record type: Article

Abstract

At the heart of needs-based assessment is an uneasy tension between agency-centred and user-centred objectives. Using case material from an ethnographic study of the process of assessment for older people, this paper looks at what happens when practitioners try to understand the needs of individual elders through a process dominated by agency agendas. By marginalizing the older person's insights, the risk of unwelcome or inappropriate intervention may increase. A user-centred approach, by contrast, requires information gathering and provision that is meaningful to the older person and sensitive to their efforts to analyse and manage their situation. These efforts are often revealed in narrative form as the person tells their story which, in an agency-centred assessment, is easily overlooked or even ignored.

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Published date: 2000

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 33627
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/33627
ISSN: 0045-3102
PURE UUID: 59fba014-ddac-4c6c-82ca-c79640ddcb4f

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Date deposited: 19 May 2006
Last modified: 07 Jan 2022 22:23

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Contributors

Author: Sally Richards

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