Managing Vulnerability

Clinicians, managers and researchers - as well as politicians and religious leaders - are worrying about a lack of compassion and humanity in the care of vulnerable people in society.In this book Tim Dartington explores the dynamics of care. He argues that we know how to do it, but somehow we seem to keep getting it wrong. Poor care in hospitals and care homes is well documented, and yet it continues. Care for people in their own homes is seen as an ideal, but the reality can be cruel and isolating. Tim describes research over forty years in thinking why institutional and community care are both subject to processes of denial and fear of dependency.His examples include children in hospital, people with disabilities living in the community, and the care of older people and those with dementia. He asks why there has been such splitting between health and social care and what underlying purpose this split may have in a societal response to vulnerability and long-term dependency. He also explores the implications of such dynamics of care in a vivid case study, drawn from his own experience, of the care as it developed over six years around a vulnerable person living and dying at home.