ABSTRACT
Community care has emerged as the antidote to long-stay institutions. In the context of services for elderly people, it is a policy ostensibly aimed at attacking the dependency associated with institutions; dependency which has been the subject of detailed documentation in empirical studies of both health and social services (Townsend, 1962; Robb, 1967). The assumptions behind the policy of community care for elderly people have much in common with those encountered in everyday life about the desirability of promoting community-based services as an alternative to ‘putting people away’. Our contention is that this convergence of assumptions resulted in community-based services becoming equated with independence and residential provision with dependence, both in policy development and in the public mind.
