Shared Resources

Key Contexts
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Chapter 11 - Chapter 20 >>

Part I

Chapters 1, 34 and 55 share the theme of learning and professional development and this forms a thin, but extremely important, thread connecting many other parts of the book. In a book about professional practice in health and social care, the knowledge cannot be detached from the practice. Every aspect of the knowledge base in different Parts – Part 1 on Learning, Part II on Contexts, Part III on the Knowledge Based and Parts IV to VIII on different aspects of Practice Development – is linked not just with what you learn but with applying that learning in practice.

 

Chapter 1

We can relate the material in Chapter 1 to the context of adult learning. There are two main aspects:

1. The psychological literature on how people learn. It is common to find psychological tests and self-tests which will enable the user to explore his or her learning style.

Some of this material is used in this chapter. There also is a considerable body of literature on working in groups, from Bion to Douglas (see Chapter 7). This tends to relate to social psychology.

2. The critical literature on models of adult learning. In this respect, the work of Paulo

Freire, to which we refer in chapter 55, is probably the most widely known, respected and influential.

Chapters 1 and 55 form a sandwich round the rest of the content of the book, in that they deal with professional development, which begins in Chapter 1 with engaging in the learning, is touched on again in Chapter 34 which deals with how to become a reflective and critical practitioner and by Chapter 55 is looking forward to the next phase in the unending process of lifelong learning.

Part II

This deals in turn with the major contexts of health and social care practice.

 

Chapter 3

This chapter relates to the contexts of social policy and sociology and is written from a historical point of view, although it is not a history as such. It brings in material from organisation and management and touches on theories of practice. As such, it has probably the broadest scope of any chapter in the book.

Consequently, this chapter might seem rather indigestible, especially if many of the facts and themes to which it refers are new to you. The Resource File before it invites you to carry out a small piece of historical research and this may help to illustrate what this chapter is largely about - exploring the links between the past and the present and showing how today's health and social care services are rooted in the economic, social and political forces shaping society.

 

Chapter 4

This chapter concentrates on one main aspect of the sociological context - the divisions and inequalities in society which contribute to discriminating against, or excluding, some people.

 

Chapter 5

This chapter relates to the context of ethical and moral ideas about health and social care practice. These belong in the study of philosophy, but this seldom forms a direct part of the curriculum. We tend to draw on those ideas which directly contribute to the discussion of values and principles of practice.

 

Chapter 6

This chapter draws on the largely biological contexts of physiology and anatomy, which play a major part in medically-based health studies. As we go through the different major organs of the body and select certain areas as a focus for brief mention of particular functions and conditions or illnesses, it is clear that this area of essentially medically and scientifically based knowledge has great relevance to health and social care practice. There are many points of practice with people who are vulnerable through impairments or physical conditions where the practitioner benefits from knowing something of the character of the condition and how it differs from normal functioning. For this reason, it will be useful to read this chapter in conjunction with Chapter 25, which deals more with how we may recognise malfunctions of the body.

 

Chapter 7

The discussion of the different contexts of psychological base for health and well-being includes perspectives on identity human development. One of the related areas we have not tackled in this book, but which is extremely important, is how gender develops. The question is how do babies and toddlers become aware of themselves as male and female.

See Trew and Kremer (1998) in Further Reading.

 

Chapter 8

This chapter is rooted in psychological and sociological contexts concerned with human development and ageing. The four perspectives (a perspective is a general or broad theoretical direction or viewpoint) from which human development and the life course are tackled in this chapter are derived from ideas based in biological, psychodynamic and behavioural, social environmental and sociological concepts. These are rooted in the wider contexts of anthropology, biology, sociology and psychology.

 

Part III

This deals with the knowledge base of the book. This is the largest Part of the book, because of the range and depth of knowledge required to work in health and social care.

Chapter 9

This chapter refers to several key contexts:

• policy and legal contexts for safeguarding adults
• research and practice knowledge of the different types of abuse of adults
• research into how to work with abused adults
• research and theorising about the causes of criminal violence in the home
• research into how to tackle criminal violence in the home.

 

Chapter 10

The main focus of this chapter is child protection. However it highlights problems of child abuse and various associated issues, such as the persistence of abuses with an institutional dimension, despite the development of child protection policies. Processes and procedures have improved since the 1990s, leading to new measures to safeguard children, but have not eliminated shortcomings of services which have allowed abuse to continue.