ABSTRACT
This chapter reports a study of the use of behavioural social work with Miss 'B', a 70-year-old woman in a home for older people mainly with a history of learning difficulties, many of them formerly housed in 'subnormality' hospitals. The impression given is that such a setting, combined with an older client group, is either not suitable for providing help of a psychosocial nature to the individual, or that the care workers are professionally ill-prepared to offer this kind of help, or at least diffident about their attempts to do so. In spite of these difficulties, instances of therapeutic intervention directed at the person in group care exist. Long-term hospital patients and residents of homes for older people are especially affected. The absence of relatives and of unpaid carers, or stress on carers, may also have been reasons for a person's admission into care in the first place.
