Search results

Devon County Council was one of the pilot sites for the Government's Care Direct initiative, a multi‐agency partnership initiative for joined‐up information and help for older people. This article describes how the service has developed, the outcomes achieved and the future plans.

The Government last year announced the development of the Care Direct service for older people, a one‐stop shop gateway to information and help. This article describes how plans are progressing to pilot the new initiative in Devon, which is one of six pilot sites.

This Paper Describes how Devon Social Services is undertaking a major revision of its care management policy in response to greatly increased levels of demand. Devon is attempting to develop a differentiated response that is more efficient and effective for the organisation, and that also gives more control to users and carers over their care arrangements.

This paper summarises the outcomes of developing a radically different approach to care management in Devon, described in MCC, Vol. 6, Issue 3. It highlights the lessons learnt and outlines how policy revision is changing the culture of the Social Services Directorate.

The author looks back on a series of articles published since 1996 in this journal, and concludes that the evidence points to the likelihood of continuing difficulties in implementing national policies at local level. The impact of New Labour approaches to community care is considered.

Examines how US and British financial institutions are implementing TQM to differentiate themselves from the competition. Discusses how customer satisfaction is achieved through customer care programmes, quality action teams, improved internal and external communications, and quality performance standards. Contends that an emerging trend in the sector is that of quality performance standard setting, measuring and monitoring. States that the financial sector is responding to this challenge by concentrating its focus on providing quality services to its customers. Concludes that customer care programmes, action teams and improved communications are the first step; the next step in maintaining the competitive edge is the establishment of quality performance standards, and devising systems for measuring and monitoring their effectiveness.

This chapter explores institution as a religious phenomenon. Institutional logics are organized around relatively stable congeries of objects, subjects, and practices. Institutional substances, the most general object of an institutional field, are immanent in the practices that organize an institutional field, values never exhausted by those practices, and practices premised on a practical belief in that substance. Like religion, an institution's practices are ontologically rational, that is, tied to a substance indexed by the conjunction of a practice and a name. Institutional substances are not loosely coupled, ceremonial, legitimating exteriors, but unquestioned, constitutive interiors, the sacred core of each field, unobservable, but socially real.