Staff and patient perspectives on unmet need and therapeutic alliance in community mental health services

Therapeutic alliance between clinicians and their patients is important in community mental healthcare. It is unclear whether providing effective interventions influences therapeutic alliance.

Quality Management and Formalization in Social Service Organizations - A Survey on Home-Based Family Intervention Services

Although the effects of quality management on social work are still widely unexplored, critics suspect that it will lead to a negative standardization of working conditions, whereas supporters of quality management hope for a greater transparency and effectiveness of service delivery. This article reports on a survey of 30 managers, 261 professionals, and 435 families in 30 family intervention service organizations. It uses cluster analysis to explore the relationship between quality management and different forms of work formalization. Results showed that working conditions generally are enabling for professional practice, but differences exist between what is called here a managerialist machine bureaucracy, an atomistic professional organization, and a collegiate professional organization.

Social services in accession countries

The 1st May 2004 10 new countries joined the European Union. It is one of the most impor-tant events in the history of the European Union and all of Europe. New nations are accessing the Community and so new challenges are emerging. An important challenge is the exchange of information in order to better understand each other. This article aims to outline informa-tion on the social services in selected accession countries - Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (hereinafter "Visegrad countries").

Decentralisation and Social Services in England

Although Great Britain is not normally credited with the achievement of having been the first nation state to implement measures characteristic of a welfare state (this honour goes to Germany and Bismarck's strategy of promoting social insurance in the 1880s) it nevertheless pioneered many models of welfare services in view of the early onset of industrialisation in that country and the subsequent social problems it created. Organisations like the Mutual Insurance and Friendly Societies, the Charity Organisation Society or the Settlement Movement characterised an early approach to welfare that is based on initiatives at the civil society level and express a sense of self-help or of self-organisation in such a way that it did not involve the state directly. The state, traditionally, dealt with matters of discipline and public order, and for this reason institutions like prisons and workhouses represented the other end of the scale of 'welfare' provisions.

Comparative Analyses of Child and Youth Services in Europe

This paper contains a comparative evaluation of the reactions of welfare states to the isomorphic pressures emanating from the European Union based on two case studies taken from the Child and Youth Welfare System. In the European Community different concepts of welfare policy exist. In the unification process every member state has to find answers to the pressure of assimilation invoked by the legislation. The objective of this explorative study is to show that countries can learn from each other in order to improve their own system of social services.

The Active Subjects of Welfare Reform: a Street-Level Comparison of Employment Services in Australia and Denmark

This paper explores the similarities and differences between Denmark and Australia in adopting welfare reform activation measures in the field of employment services. In Australia and Denmark the discourse of welfare reform centres the 'activation' of citizens through 'mutual obligation' type requirements. Through various forms of case management, unemployed individuals are encouraged to act upon themselves in creating the right set of ethical dispositions congruent with 'active citizenship'. At the same time any resistance to heightened conditionality on the part of the unemployed person is dealt with through a range of coercive and disciplinary techniques. A comparative case study between these two countries allows us to consider how similar ideas, discourse and principles are shaping policy implementation in countries that have very different welfare state trajectories and institutional arrangements for the delivery of social welfare generally and employment services specifically. And in research terms, a comparison between a Nordic welfare state and an Anglo-Saxon welfare state provides an opportunity to critically examine the utility of 'welfare regime' type analyses and the neo-liberal convergence thesis in comparative welfare research. On the basis of empirical analysis, the article concludes that a single focus on abstract typologies or political ideologies is not very helpful in getting the measure of welfare reform (or any other major policy development for that matter). At the 'street-level' of policy practice there is considerably more ambiguity, incoherence and contradiction than is suggested by linear accounts of welfare reform.

Book Review of “At Risk: Social Justice in Child Welfare and Other Human Services” by Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan, 2009, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

The newest book by Canadian social work scholars Karen Swift and Marilyn Callahan is exemplary of how other disciplines can invigorate social work theory. “At Risk” uses child welfare practice as an entry point for exploring the continuing movement away from addressing needs and towards the management of risk in the human services.

Determining the long-term changes in biodiversity and provisioning services along a transect from Central Europe to the Mediterranean

Climate, land use and fire are strong determinants of plant diversity, potentially resulting in local extinctions, including rare endemic and economically valuable species. While climate and land use are decisive for vegetation composition and thus the species pool, fire disturbance can lead to landscape fragmentation, affecting the provisioning of important ecosystem services such as timber and raw natural resources. We use multi-proxy palaeoecological data with high taxonomic and temporal resolution across an environmental gradient to assess the long-term impact of major climate shifts, land use and fire disturbance on past vegetation openness and plant diversity (evenness and richness). Evenness of taxa is inferred by calculating the probability of interspecific encounter (PIE) of pollen and spores and species richness by palynological richness (PRI). To account for evenness distortions of PRI, we developed a new palaeodiversity measure, which is evenness-detrended palynological richness (DE-PRI). Reconstructed species richness increases from north to south regardless of time, mirroring the biodiversity increase across the gradient from temperate deciduous to subtropical evergreen vegetation. Climatic changes after the end of the last ice age contributed to biodiversity dynamics, usually by promoting species richness and evenness in response to warming. The data reveal that the promotion of diverse open-land ecosystems increased when human disturbance became determinant, while forests became less diverse. Our results imply that the today’s biodiversity has been shaped by anthropogenic forcing over the millennia. Future management strategies aiming at a successful conservation of biodiversity should therefore consider the millennia-lasting role of anthropogenic fire and human activities.

Opportunities and limits of the ecosystem services framework in capturing the cultural dimension of sustainable regional and landscape development in protected areas

With regard to protected areas, the concepts of ecosystem services and the cultural dimension of sustainable development (SD) are increasingly under debate. This contribution analyses the role of cultural aspects within the ecosystem services framework using the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment classification as a reference. The limits of the ecosystem services framework in capturing the cultural dimension are highlighted. Potential ways of strengthening the position of cultural values within this framework are discussed.