And the St Christopher’s paper in the journal Groupwork is one of our series on day care. For some time, we have been arguing that the main purpose of palliative day care is to meet social objectives, but the focus on medical objectives in the research has tended to suggest that day care is not ‘effective’. What this means is that it’s not effective in meeting medical objectives. Whoever set up a day centre to meet medical objectives?

This is another example of the Department of Health promoting something called ‘healthnsocialcare’, thinking that social care just supports healthcare objectives. Actually, of course, there are very legitimate social objectives in healthcare, which ought to be defined and explicitly measured. But what you get from healthcare researchers is a shrug of the shoulders and a ‘not us gov’.

This research set out to see if patients could identify social objectives in the groups they were part of in the St Christopher’s day centre. Yes, they could, and they liked what they experienced, as all the research shows. Interestingly, though, many of the staff focused on achievement and self-fulfilment, but didn’t explicitly pursue and help people with the social objectives.

Food for thought there. Social objectives are just like healthcare objectives in that you have to specifically define them and set up activities that aim to meet them. You can’t just assume that people will develop social skills because you put them in a social situation; you have to design the social situation and the programme to hit the objectives. I think healthcare professionals and researchers tend not to think about that.

Payne, M., Hartley, N. and Heal, R. (2008) Social objectives of palliative day care groups. Groupwork 18(1): 39-75.