Support to ‘non-clients’: care managers’ role in direct and indirect carer support
2024 (English)In: European Journal of Social Work, ISSN 1369-1457, E-ISSN 1468-2664Article in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]
Social service provision in Europe has increasingly incorporated informal carers. Consequently, these carers are now included within the scope of all social workers, including care managers. Most support for carers is indirect support, where opportunities for respite are channelled through the care receiver’s needs assessment. This approach highlights the unique role of care managers providing carer support as they balance their public task directed towards clients with the concurrent policy-driven expectation to support carers. The aim of this article is to explore how care managers, as street-level bureaucrats, ‘make’ carer support policy on the ground. Using systematic text condensation of 10 qualitative interviews with care managers in Sweden, we present three themes to understand care managers’ experiences. Care managers work ‘Hand-in-hand’ and ‘hands on’ with carers, carers are within, yet outside one’s scope of work, and there are possibilities and practices towards a carer perspective. Following Lipsky’s dictum that street-level bureaucrats’ actions effectively ‘become’ the public policy they carry out, our results highlight care managers’ possibilities and challenges in shaping what direct and indirect carer support looks like on the ground.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Taylor & Francis, 2024.
Keywords [en]
care manager, Caregiver, family carer, needs assessor, street-level bureaucrats, adult, aged, article, Europe, family, female, human, informal caregiver, interview, male, manager, needs assessment, social work, social worker, Sweden, very elderly, young adult
National Category
Social Work
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-64793DOI: 10.1080/13691457.2024.2358350ISI: 001236000300001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85194837502Local ID: HOA;;955484OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hj-64793DiVA, id: diva2:1867406
Funder
Forte, Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, Dnr 2020-013262024-06-102024-06-102024-06-10