ABSTRACT
Baths in the community are predominantly provided by home care workers. This has not always been so. Up until the 1980s, personal care including bathing in Britain was regarded as a nursing activity, something that belonged to the medical rather than social care sector. The management of the body, at least in its naked or more vulnerable forms was seen as a nursing task, unless that body was contained within a formal care setting. During the 1990s, however, a series of changes, institutional, financial, political, produced a new configuration in which personal care came to be part of social care. As a result bathing is now fully integrated into the home care service. In this chapter we will explore the nature of these changes, in particular the impact of the reforms in the nineties that created the new community care. This has ushered in a more fragmented world of provision in which the private sector plays an increasingly significant role; and in the last part of the chapter we will reflect upon the nature of this market and in particular on features of the home care sector that pose problems for the application of economic rationality. Before doing so however we need to explore the meaning of the medical/social boundary, for it is the fact that bathing and personal care fall across this central faultline of community care that explains some tensions in its provision.
