Giving a fig about roles: Policy, context and work in community mental health care

Hannigan, Ben ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2512-6721 and Allen, Davina Ann ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6729-7502 2011. Giving a fig about roles: Policy, context and work in community mental health care. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 18 (1) , pp. 1-8. 10.1111/j.1365-2850.2010.01631.x

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Abstract

Across the UK, mental health professionals are strongly objecting to threats to their roles. Against this background we use ethnographic data from a study of roles and responsibilities in community care, undertaken across two contrasting sites in Wales, to demonstrate how work is sensitive to local organizational features and to show how gaps can grow between the public claims professions make about their contributions and the actual roles which their members fulfil in the workplace. We reveal how, in one of our two research sites, immediate contextual features shaped the work of nurses and social workers towards the fulfilment of expanded packages of activity. We then show how subsequent policy (including ‘new ways of working’), combined with new pressures arising from the economic downturn, carry the potential to accelerate the wider creation of workplaces of this type. We examine some implications of these processes for nurses and others, and for the system of mental health care as a whole, and conclude with a call for closer attention to be paid to the potential, wider, impact of current developments.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Healthcare Sciences
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry R Medicine > RT Nursing
Uncontrolled Keywords:	community care; health and social policy; health services delivery; multidisciplinary care; systems of care
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1351-0126
Last Modified:	15 May 2023 20:18
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/7500

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