Creating New Services

Abstract

Social workers can do a great deal to help by making sure that existing services are publicised and do their declared job. They can do even more by treating every mentally handicapped person, and every family of a mentally handicapped person, as unique: by trying to understand the precise meaning of mental handicap for that person or family, and by finding ways of responding to their individual needs, whether through existing services or by improvisation. In most places certain needs are not being met because some element in the total pattern of service is missing. This is the starting-point for what we might call service renewal. This process should be an essential and routine part of any service system. Whatever system one builds some people will be left out of it — not from malice or stupidity, but from ordinary human blindness. If this could be accepted as a fact of life, it would perhaps be easier to make proposals for change without seeming to criticise the life’s work of those who run existing services. Since it rarely is accepted, social workers must assume that change will only occur if a good case is made for it, and often only if an aggressive campaign is waged.