The authors use this volume to demonstrate how social work can make a significant contribution to creating greater equality in the experience of illness and health care as well as to describe the major adjustments in conceptualization, practice, and organization necessary to achieve this change. The book focuses on four key aspects, health maintenance, illness at home, hospitalization, and impending death, in seven sections..
–Journal of Social Work Education, Vol. 37.3
In three key ways Social Work, Health and Equality suggests what social work can contribute to people's health. It will be essential reading for trainees and professionals in social work and health care.
Deepening health inequalities, the restructuring of the welfare state involving the fragmentation of social work as a recognisable discipline and popular disaffection with health and welfare professionals underline the need to rethink social work’s contribution to people’s health.
In three main ways Social Work, Health and Inequality suggests what social work can contribute to people’s health:
- the magnitude of the profound and unjust human suffering which arises from the impact of social inequalities on health should be a matter of urgent concern to social workers.
- through focusing on this problem, social work can make a significant contribution to more equal chances and experiences of health and illness.
- to make such an impact requires major shifts in the conceptualisation, practice and organisation of social work.
Social Work, Health and Equality will be essential reading to trainees and professionals in social work and health care.
Throughout the Western world, welfare states are in transition. Changing social, economic and political circumstances have rendered obsolete the systems that emerged in the 1940s out of the experiences of depression, war and social conflict. New structures of welfare are now taking shape in response to the conditions of today: globalisation and individuation, the demise of traditional allegiances and institutions, the rise of new forms of identity and solidarity.
In Britain, the New Labour government has linked the projects of implementing a new welfare settlement and forging a new moral purpose in society. Enforcing ‘welfare to work’ on the one hand, and tackling ‘social exclusion’ on the other, the government aims to rebalance the rights and duties of citizens and redefine the concept of equality.
