ABSTRACT
The term ‘community care’ has a range of meanings. The focus in this chapter is on those policies and services which aim to provide help and support to disabled or older people to assist them to achieve a normal life in their own homes or in a ‘homely environment’. Users of such services include older people, younger disabled people with physical or sensory impairments, people with a learning disability and people with mental health problems. The main public sector services which provide community care are local authority social services and community health services. The NHS and Community Care Act 1990 made it clear that local authorities are the lead agencies in ensuring the provision of community care. As in other areas of public sector provision, financial and organizational structures were introduced which were designed to ensure an injection of market principles into service provision. These financial arrangements give incentives for authorities to shift from bureaucratic control over their own services towards a greater degree of agency control through contracting-out services to the private and voluntary sectors.
