Managing Vulnerability (Tavistock Clinic Series) - Softcover

Dartington, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1855758881 ISBN 13: 9781855758889

Publisher: Routledge, 2010

Synopsis

Clinicians, managers and researchers - as well as politicians and religious leaders - are worrying about a lack of compassion and humanity in the care of vulnerable people in society. In this book The author explores the dynamics of care. He argues that we know how to do it, but somehow we seem to keep getting it wrong. Poor care in hospitals and care homes is well documented, and yet it continues. Care for people in their own homes is seen as an ideal, but the reality can be cruel and isolating. The author describes research over forty years in thinking why institutional and community care are both subject to processes of denial and fear of dependency. His examples include children in hospital, people with disabilities living in the community, and the care of older people and those with dementia.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Dartington was a researcher at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the 1970s and worked there with Eric Miller and Isabel Menzies Lyth. He has continued to carry out consultancy and research in health and social care from a systems psychodynamic perspective and has written on the organizational issues in the delivery of care.

Review

"Dartington, a consultant and social science researcher in health and social care who is an associate at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in Britain, describes how the systems of care can encourage or inhibit the natural processes of compassion and care that affect people's everyday experiences of vulnerability at different stages of life, such as older people, people with learning and physical disabilities, and children. He discusses the changes in institutional and community care over the past 40 years; a systems psychodynamics approach to understanding the management of care; the characteristics of care systems, such as management, the isolation of services, human nature and organizational change, and costs, and the need for integration of systems; and a case study of what happened when his wife developed dementia." (Book News Inc. 2012-04-01)

"A unique, intelligent and passionate text about the many ways we - as individuals and as society – try to evade, actually hate, facing the facts of helplessness. Public services designed to provide rapid positive outcomes become clumsy when dealing with deterioration, yet that is where our humanity is tested. And we will be there ourselves, one day. Tim Dartington reveals the wisdom of decades of experience as a Tavistock social scientist, with painful examples from his consultancy practice of life at the front line, then gives a brilliant account of his attempts to get coherent help for his wife, Anna, as she became demented in middle age. With comments from Anna herself, this is very moving. A learned account of defences against vulnerability laced with deadpan irony creates irresistible and instructive reading for all who use or provide public services." (Dr Sebastian Kraemer, Consultant Psychiatrist)

"Original, absorbing, unsettling and beautifully written, Managing Vulnerability is an important book for anyone dealing seriously with the predicaments of caring institutions or who is concerned with renewing the capacity of society to address profound human need. Tim Dartington brings to light the social and psychological matrix that shapes our systems of care and how today's cultural context, which so often de-values dependence, creates debilitating cross currents for leaders and managers of organizations providing care. This book provides a penetrating account of how emotions associated with the work of caring find their way into the structure, informal processes, and functioning of modern caring institutions." (James Krantz, PhD, Principal, Worklab Consulting, NYC; Past President, International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO))

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1855758881
• ISBN 13: 9781855758889
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256