| As the aging problem in China becomes more severe,China is facing a large challenge of the elderly care services.Providing a comfortable life for the elderly is a major concern for the public in China.Currently,there are three major modes in elderly care:family care,institutional care and community care.As the miniaturization of the family structure and the changes in people’s lifestyles and ideas,traditional model of providing for the aged is unable to meet the elderly’s needs.Moreover,community care with slow development has shortcomings such as insufficient beds,various quality of service and high costs,which cannot solve the supporting problem effectively.However,community care combines the advantages of family care and institutional care,and the elderly are able to live in their original families and enjoy professional services at the same time.Nowadays,China is vigorously promoting the community elderly care service.Social work,with its strong advantages in community care services,has solid theoretical foundation,practical methods and proven skills.Its intervention in community care services promotes the development of community care services.This paper focuses on community care services and problems that exist in intervention of social work in community care services.At present,community care services in Guangzhou are mainly implemented by social work agencies,which provide a good opportunity to study social work intervention in such services.Thus,W street community in Guangzhou was taken as a case to study elderly community care.Through participatory observation,the process of social work intervention processes in community elderly care services was recorded.Also,interviews with related social workers and the elderly were conducted to analyze the intervention process.This paper found that intervention in community care services can provide professional community care services for the elderly and meet diversified needs of them.Specially,case work can reflect the value and function of social work in the best way.Aiming at the peculiarity and specific needs of the service targets,social workers connect and integrate social,which can effectively help the elderly solve problems and enhance the ability of coping with risks.Social group work creates opportunities for the elderly in the community to develop interests and get new knowledge.In order to provide a platform for the elderly to learn and master new knowledge and skills and increase the social participation,social workers organize group activities by recruiting old people with common interests and hobbies.Social community work concentrates on mining and mobilizing resources of the community both internally and externally,popularizing health,health care,and anti-fraud knowledge,providing health measurement and assistive devices rental service,and raising community residents’ concern to the community care in the form of community activities.However,there are some challenges in community care services of W Street.For example,the elderly in the W Street community know little about community care services,the number of social workers on the service side is insufficient and has large mobility,the integrating between community care services and needs of old people is low,and the source of funds is single,which restricts the development of community care services.In the meanwhile,intervention in community care services also has some problems.First,the coverage of case service is small,and the professionalism of the service is difficult to guarantee.Second,the content of group activities is lack of innovations,the guiding skills in activities are insufficient.Third,the propaganda of community activities is not in place,and the service level of community work is relatively shallow.All those existing problems hinder functions that social work plays in community service for the aged.In order to solve the above problems,this paper put forward the countermeasures to optimize social workers’ intervention in community care services.First,the publicity of community pension services should be enhanced to increase the social recognition of community care services and social work.Second,the talent team construction of social workers should be strengthened by improving treatment,and preferring training andsupervision mechanism.At the same time,link and integrate resources of the community,and form a larger community care service team.In addition,broaden channels of funds through applying for venture philanthropy and exploring low-paid or paid community care services. |
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