A useful book came out last year  on Islam and social work: see the Policy Press website:

http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781861349477&sf1=contributor&st1=Basia%20w/2%20Spalek&m=1&dc=4

The occasion of mentioning this is that I have found in a teaching document for a social work masters a number of websites on Islamic social welfare; you might find these of interest or use:

http://www.jammu-kashmir.com/insights/insight20000330a.html

http://muslim-canada.org/welfare.htm

http://www.muslimtents.com/shaufi/b16/b16_17.htm

Original source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22606851/Usefull-Websites-for-MA-Final-Social-Work-UOP-By-Imran-Ahmad-Sajid

Incidentally, they should change their approved photo of Dave on the Conservative website; it makes him look a bit immature, when more recent pics show him as being a more haggard now. But I should talk: the Director of Nursing says my pic on this blog is a bit flattering. Well, if that’s a bit flattering, what must the reality be like? I’m not saying.

David Cameron the Conservative opposition party leader, made a speech last week on the ‘Big society’, which put forward his thinking on poverty and social intervention generally. As always, they’re against the state doing it, and many people can accept that there is a considerable degree of state failure in social provision. The problem for the Conservatives is that there’s a high degree of market failure in social provision as well. Often everyone accepts that the market is not the place for social interventions, or they have to set up some convoluted quasi-market system that is not really a market, and institutionalises complex state controls over voluntary action.

Voluntary organisations may be wonderful, but to rely on voluntary organisations to deliver wide-scale state services is inappropriate; it twists voluntary action by making it involuntary.

You can see this in the hospice movement. Hospices in the UK are mainly in the voluntary sector because St Christopher’s was originally a demonstration of what was possible in care for the dying and their families at a time when not a lot was done. Now Conservatives routinely say how wonderful voluntary hospices are as an example of how lots of other services should be run. But proper care for dying people and their families is a responsibility of society where government should take a lead and make sure that a high standard of care is widely available. They should not be pleased that they can offload that responsibility because enough sentimental and well-off people will make donations to support it,

Cameron’s speech on the web: http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/10/David_Cameron_The_Big_Society.aspx

The Touchstone blog by Richard Exell has a useful discussion of the speech, with references to many of the past Conservative documents on the topic that many people will not be aware of and rehearses the arguments against it; however, be aware that Touchstone is a TUC (ie trade union) blog:

http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk/2009/11/david-cameron%E2%80%99s-big-society-speech/

A new Alzheimer’s Society survey looked at care for people with dementia on hospital wards: a massive 77% of carers were dissatisfied with the weay that their relatives with dementia were cared for in hospitals wards. Would it be any better in hospices? You would hope so, at least partly because staffing is better. But most older people do not come into hospices for their dementia, but for other conditions, so nurses and other staff may be as clueless as their colleagues in hospitals about caring appropriately for people with dementia.

Lakey, L (2009) Counting the cost: Caring for people with dementia on hospital wards. London: Alzheimer’s Society.

Note that many of the official websites focus on social care, not on healthcare; yes, there are healthcare treatments to be done, but most of the issues are about how people live with dementia.

The main BBC report on the study has an interview with Angela Rippon, the former tv newsreader, about her mother as well as a good summary of the main facts:

On the web: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8359836.stm

The BBC learning site has an ace video case study of a woman with early stage Alzheimer’s and her husband. Although her family resources are such that many of the problems health and social care people see are mitigated, it does show people working on coping.

BBC Headroom info: http://www.bbc.co.uk/headroom/wellbeing/guides/alzheimers_and_dementia.shtml

There are also lots of  good Alzheimer’s society fact sheets: http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents.php?categoryID=200137

On a positive note, there’s a lot of useful practical and professional information on the SCIE dementia gateway website:http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/dementia/index.asp

You may also want to look at the Department of Health National Dementia Strategy website: http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/SocialCare/Deliveringadultsocialcare/Olderpeople/NationalDementiaStrategy/index.htm

Involve, the healthcare organisation that worries about user involvement in health and social care (patient involvement to healthcare people who have not imbibed the somewhat- unpleasant-and-incomprehensible-to-most-people but politically correct terminology for the people you work with) has published a review of research on involving users and patients (user of course are different from patients, because the patient’s family and carers also use your service).

It summarises a lot of useful (I originally mistyped userful and that would be appropriate too) practical information and is also a good example of how to do a literature review. Users can be involved in almost all stages of research  Increasingly, they have to be if you are going to get cooperation in being researched, as the co-badging of this report with the insignia of the NHS National Institute for Health Research shows. A lot of health researchers have not got this point yet, as a recent application to research some of our patients shows.

Only one citation from palliative care: Cotterell, P., Clarke, P., Cawdrey, D., Kapp, J., Paine,
M. & Wynn, R. (2007) Becoming involved in research: A service user research advisory group. In Creative engagement in palliative care: New perspectives on user involvement. L. Jarrett, ed.,Radcliffe Publishing, Oxford, pp. 101-115.

Staley, K. (2009)Exploring Impact: Public involvement in NHS, public health and social care research. Eastleigh: Involve.

On the web:http://www.invo.org.uk/pdfs/Involve_Exploring_Impactfinal28.10.09.pdf

A number of local councils have ‘Beacon status’ (that means the government has decided they are an example to us all) for ‘positive engagement of older people to support and promote greater independence and well-being in later life’; there are four case studies on the Idea website which show what they did. We could all learn from this, including palliative care organisations, because we should all be encouraging older people to change our services for the better.

On the web: http://beacons.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=9413984

An interesting discussion of how our attitudes to social policy have changed is in the journal Social Policy and Administration, written by Paul Wilding, a now retired guru of left-wingish thinking. He says six changes are important:

More social problems have come to be seen as having a supra-national dimension: the scale and ramifications of problems are much better appreciated; the accepted territory of social policy has greatly widened; the state has lost people’s confidence; we have come to see organizational and management issues as much more important; and the health of the economy has come to be regarded as a greater priority than the development of systems of social welfare.

Do that’s why we all face targets and concern about delivery, and also why we seem to think everything is far too complicated to achieve anything. But the history shows that if we keep pegging away at something, we can make inroads over time; that’s why it’s worth working in health and social care, instead of making money in banking.

Paul Wilding

An interesting Parliamentary asnwer tells us how many residential and nursing home care places are funded by local authorities under the National Assistance Act (basically through the community care system but the legislation actually goes back to 1948).

Mr. Stephen O’Brien: To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many adults have received support under section 21 of the National Assistance Act 1948 in each year since 1997. [298302]
9 Nov 2009 : Column 127W

Phil Hope: Section 21 of the National Assistance Act 1948 empowers local authorities to support people in residential and nursing care. Data on the number of adults—aged 18 and over—in local authority supported registered residential and nursing care is collected and published by the NHS Information Centre for health and social care via the Supported Residents (SRI) return.

Table 1 shows the numbers of adults—aged 18 and over—in local authority funded residential and nursing care, including numbers in adult placements/Shared Lives, as at 31 March for the years 1997 to 2005 in England.

9 Nov 2009 : Column 128W

From 2006, the numbers in adult placements/Shared Lives were collected separately. Table 2 shows the numbers of adults—aged 18 and over—in local authority funded residential and nursing care and numbers in adult placements/Shared Lives, as at 31 March for the years 2006 to 2008 in England. Information for 2009 is expected to be published in early 2010.

On the web:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm091109/text/91109w0028.htm#column_128W

I see from Hansard that we have a minister for the ageing society; I’m so pleased – does that mean anyone’s doing anything? Perhaps someone would ask her.

The Minister for Pensions and the Ageing Society (Angela Eagle)

This year, the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcomes and Death, covered a whole range of issues, but has a chapter (8) on end of life care for people who died soon after admission to general hospitals. The report is a well-written analysis of questionnaires completed by the original team and assessments by expert advisers. There are some interesting case studies.

The picture is not good as the recommendations of this chapter, reprinted below, show; a third did not receive good practice. The good intentions of the end-of-life care strategy are compared with the actuality. You could sum up the main issues as a failure to plan for the care of people who were clearly coming towards the end of life, and to engage with the patient and relatives about the care plan (if any – often there wasn’t). The picture of no decisions about ‘do not attempt resuscitation’ orders not being made, or being made by junior doctors, and often not being discussed with patients and families, is contrary to professional guidance and a sad indictment of the failure in many hospitals to take responsibility for care for people who are dying.  They also did not involve the palliative care team of the hospital when they should.

49.8% of patients, who died with 96 hours of admission to acute hospitals, were not expected to survive and 68.7% of these were considered to have received good practice.

The advisors considered that 5.9% of patients had an unnecessary admission to hospital and this was due to a deficiency of social and medical support in the community.

In 16.9% (219/1293) of patients who were not expected to survive on admission there was no evidence of any discussion between the health care team and either the patient or relatives on treatment limitation.

Of those patients not expected to survive on admission in only a third were end of life care pathways used and 30% did not have do not attempt resuscitation (DNAR) orders.

In 21.8% of cases DNAR orders were signed by very junior trainee doctors.

Palliative care teams were rarely involved in the care of patients who died in this study.
There were examples of where health care professionals were judged not to have the skills required to care for patients nearing the end of their lives. This was particularly so in relation to a lack of the abilities to identify patients approaching the end of life, inadequate implementation of end of life care and the poor communication with patients, relatives and other health care professions.

National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (2009) Caring to the End? A review of the care of patients who died in hospital within four days of admission. London: NCEPOD

On the web: http://www.ncepod.org.uk/2009report2/Downloads/DAH_report.pdf