Assessment in Adults’ Services

In this chapter we will focus on mostly service users, particularly older people, people with mental illnesses, and disabled people and their carers. We will stress, however, that all these people have many problems in common, for example, health, safety, housing, income support and discrimination. They all can be vulnerable and neglected and, in the not too distant past, the services responsible for them were seen as Cinderella services, which depended on unqualified workers and were underfunded. Services have improved over the years with an increase in qualified workers with government undertaking a large-scale transformation in adult services, based on entitlement and choice and involving individual personalized budgets. This has been followed by the further development of integrated health and social care services.