© British Association of Social Workers
Care Management and Information Provision: Towards a Reasoned Method of Assessing the Range and Extent of Problems and Needs in Child-Care Social Work
Professor Michael Sheppard is based in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Plymouth
Dr Graham Crocker in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Plymouth
Correspondence to Professor Michael Sheppard, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA
Summary
The new managerialism associated with care management has, as with other areas of health and welfare work, promoted ideas of efficient use of resources, quality assurance and the capacity to audit the work of welfare agencies. This approach places a high premium on measurement, and emphazises a long-standing desire to develop instruments the use of which would provide the basis for resource allocation. This paper presents a method by which such data can be rigorously generated and analysed. It uses as its basis an instrument of established reliability and validity, designed to collect data on problems identified in clients in the child and family care social work group. It uses a combination of principal component and cluster analysis to provide a clear picture of the nature and range of problems and the grouping of cases with similar characteristics. These data provide a quantitative basis upon which judgements about resource allocation can be made.