The implications for social services departments of the information task in the social care market
The new information task faced by social services departments (SSDs) implementing the 1990 community care policy is huge. This paper notes the breadth and complexity of the early guidance on the subject and then examines the nature of the task and the issues it raised in a shire county. Three aspects are delineated: mapping needs, mapping the market and monitoring expenditure. We found that the county experienced a culture shift in order to accommodate the new requirements, but had difficulty in timing the introduction of its information and information technology (IT) software systems. Change associated with one aspect of implementation had important knock-on effects in others. We highlight the danger of procedures becoming system-driven and of staff being overwhelmed by the call for information. We note that by the end of 1994 (the end of the research period) the county was facing what we have termed ‘second wave’ challenges. We conclude that implementing community care requires an indefinite investment in people and systems and that the process challenges are in danger of diverting attention away from user and carer experiences and from outcomes.
Planning for Life: Involving Adults with Learning Disabilities in Service Planning
Policies for people with learning disabilities, as in the case with other groups of service users, have increasingly emphasised the importance of their involvement in the planning of their own services, and at a more general level in the development of their local authority community care plan and commissioning strategies. This thesis seeks to begin to explore some of the difficulties that may arise in attempting to implement such a policy through a case study of practices in one inner London Borough. The study includes a number of important interrelated themes including: the complexities of communication, normalisation, the nature of choice, citizenship and free will, and asks does social policy reform provision or create unrealistic expectations and burdens for social service professionals and service users? It is essentially a study about communication and its impact on choice and social inclusion. Focusing on communication between professionals and service users, their carers and advocates, the field study investigates the Council’s strategic planning procedures in order to explore the relationship between service development and the preferences expressed by users. The findings are presented within a legislative framework, with particular interest paid to the government’s White Papers ‘Modernising Social Services, ’ ‘Valuing People, ’ and the Best Value initiative. The study combines an historical account of policy development, and investigates social policies that have attempted to bring about change, while also exposing the contradictions within and between them. Because of this there are many challenges attached to this enterprise, and as a consequence the study is inevitably on a small scale and the answers it produces are tentative. Nevertheless it provides an indication of the nature and scale of the difficulties which social services will have to overcome if they
Research on Control and Planning of Soft-Wing UAV for Haze Removal
The existence of fog and haze has caused great pollution to the environment. The research of removing haze is a hot topic in recent years. In this paper, a special haze removal algorithm based on Soft- Wing UAVis proposed. In this algorithm, two track control strategies are designed based on the Soft-Wing UAV model transfer function. A SIMULINK platform based mathematical model of Soft-Wing UAV is built to testified effectiveness of the two track control strategies. An autonomous ergodic-planning algorithm with greedy strategy and foldback algorithm for Soft-Wing UAV is designed. Within the algorithm, the haze regional has been modelled, the cost matrix is constructed, and the planning and ergodic strategy is proposed. Finally, the experimental results validates the reliability of the algorithm in the application of haze removal with the proposed evaluation Index.