2.2 Care Act 2014
The Community Care Act 2014 sections 1, 2 and 4 highlights the general responsibilities of the act and it could be said the ones that most affect social workers in making decisions for action. We will look at these sections to see how they fit alongside the BASW Code of Ethics for Social Workers (2012).
S.1 promoting individual wellbeing: This section states that the core purpose of adult care and support is to help people to achieve the outcomes that matter to them in their life. The general duty of a local authority, in exercising a function under this part in the case of an individual, is to promote general wellbeing (Department of Health 2014). The concept of “Well-being” is defined in five main areas. (a) as personal
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In reference to S2 of the BASW Code of Ethic that stresses the importance that social work should be based upon the value of respect and dignity whilst promoting human dignity and well-being, respecting the right to self-determination, for eg. People should be supported to make their own choices (BASW 2012). All these values are then promoted in the care acts definition of “wellbeing”. However, when looking into how the act aims to promote wellbeing there are a few statements that could be said to conflict with these values. Namely section 1.14c that states “the importance of preventing or delaying the development of needs for care and support and the importance of reducing needs that already exist” (Department of Health 2014). This section it could be said would conflict with social workers values whilst also conflicting with the act …show more content…
It could be argued however that this complements the social workers value that “the promotion of empowerment must be upheld” (BASW 2012), by convincing people to help themselves they are left empowered and self-reliant rather than relying on others. It is more likely however that this is one of those aforementioned new spheres of values that conflict with the traditional social work values, and is the domain of political ideologies that have aimed to reshape the humanist social work models (Bernard 2008), thus the value of money (funding) is placed above the fundamental value of the acts flagship concept of “wellbeing”. In fact the government regards this of such importance that they have added a whole section to the