ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows how health geographers can usefully adopt a networked approach as an effective tool through which to examine how health and social welfare provision becomes socially constructed and reconstructed across space and place. Networks are inherently spatial and, as such, offer considerable potential for further geographical enquiry into health related issues. The implementation and success of care policies depend in part on the inter-relationships between these various players. The book examines these inter-relationships, illustrated by an in-depth empirical study of policy makers and informal care providers concerned with the frail elderly in Scotland. Taking the voluntary sector as a lens through which these inter-relationships are explored, it analyzes how voluntary support is affected by differing local contexts of care and what this means in terms of locally based care outcomes.