Case Management:a Professional Mode In Community-based Elderly Care

The main characteristic of China’s elderly care is family oriented, supplemented with community care and agency services. The newly developing model of community-based elderly care is more compatible with the Chinese traditions, and allows mobilizing and taking use of variety of resources, aiming at a service of quality at a lower cost and keeping the younger family members involved. With the mushrooming of this model of elderly care, social work service in the community-based elderly care is becoming a more and more occupational helping profession. Main methods of social work service in community-based elderly care are usually broken into three categories, that is, case work, group work and community work. However, due to the fact that the elderly persons have different needs and at the same time, resources available are always limited, and families alone can not supposed to take care of their own persons in needs, it is much hard for any single method of social work service to meet the needs. In some cases, many seniors could be facing with more than one problem, and it needs a team of workers to intervene; and in some other cases, many seniors have difficulties in effectively take use of resources, a fact that needs social workers to choose case management as the model of their service practice. The so called case management is a coordinating process in which a team of professional helpers working together to provide care for people with different needs. The advantage of case management, on one hand, is that it can use comprehensive methods to serve people with different needs, and it can coordinate different resources which are necessary for elderly care, on the other. Meanwhile, case management emphasizes a professional process, which means that social workers must deploy professional skills to establish the helping relationship, conduct evaluation of social needs, work out a helping plan, mobilize resources, integrate services, and in the end, close the case, and the tasks of re-establishing relationship, re-evaluating and continuous planning and service providing must been carried out. As its stress on service quality which requires respects to clients and a human-orientation, plus with its integrating methods and service skills, case management in community-based elderly care is comparatively advanced and more feasible. For sure the model is not a perfect intervention, but the paper argues that it will help clients be more confident in helping themselves, and will play a positive role in the community-based elderly care service and services in some other sectors.