ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses work in the social care area. Within social care, the development of new types of care such as extra-care services and assisted living facilities means that traditional divisions between service types are, thankfully, becoming much less relevant. Human lives are thankfully much too complicated for simple reductionist quantitative models to predict exactly the changes in individual welfare that follow from care interventions. A major challenge on the demand side, therefore, is to deal with the 'co-production' of welfare, acknowledging the major impacts of non-service related factors on outcomes. The operationalisation of broad policy objectives such as maximising independence will associate different priorities with particular welfare outcomes, such as reducing the risk of institutionalisation or supporting carers, depending on individual circumstances. The development of the Single Assessment Process in England and the expansion of computerised records offer potentially valuable new data sources.
