ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the social workers have sought to make their services available in different community settings. The emergence of the idea of 'Patch' as a model for service delivery was a major development of the 1980s, and laid the foundations for the interdisciplinary approach to community care. A scheme with some similarities to Patch, but one targeted specifically on the elderly infirm with the explicit goal of reducing departmental costs by delaying admission to Part III accommodation, was the Kent Community Care Scheme. Indeed, they claim dramatic results, saying that their implementation of the community care approach halved the probability of death, halved the probability of entering an institution and doubled the probability of the elderly people continuing to live in their own homes. Largely as a result of Bleddyn Davies's painstakingly researched pioneering work in Kent, the conceptual model of community care came to be built into the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 and implemented in 1993.
