This essay will discuss the capacity of communities to provide much-needed support to people with various disabilities in the United Kingdom communities. The task of this essay is to identify the role of the community’s involvement in health and social care policy, including a brief history concerning community care and its related legislation and its related impacts. Herein, potential and problems for effective support for the community in the provision of health and social care for disabled people will be analyzed. Lastly, the roles of multi-agency and partnerships in community needs support will also be examined. The issue of provision of support services to various service users who have various disabilities in communities is the hottest in both developed and developing countries. This essay examined communities' capacity to provide the so much needed help by disabled persons well and with the level of seriousness that it deserves and in close connection with the Social Progress Index which was recently launched as a way of measuring non-economic national developments (Kioes and Pfeiffer, 2015; Porter et al, 20013; Porter et al, 2015; Boltvinik 1992; Sen, 1992).
Both Not-for-Profit organizations, governments, private companies, and communities themselves have roles to play in providing certain groups of service users with basic needs especially health and social care, and possibly assisting them to stand independently on their own against both social and economic challenges. The most vulnerable groups of service users in communities are mainly the poorest, the disabled, minors, and women just to mention a few.
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The origins and development of community care can be easily traced back decades and since then to date, community care has been included as part of police and legislation developments in many countries (Brown, 2010). Various scholars have attempted to define the terms community and care. The term ‘Community’ was defined geographically by Chaskin (1999) as a subarea of a city in which residents are presumed to share both spatial proximity and some degree of mutual circumstance, need, priorities, and access to the broader metropolitan area and the systems that have an impact on their lives. Community is any configuration of individuals, families, and groups whose values, characteristics, interests, geography, or social relations unite them in some way (see Dreher, 2016). Both Chaskin and Dreher’s definitions of the community share common features such as similar values and degree of circumstances, issues to do with geography or area, interests, and most importantly there exist people be they in families, groups, or individuals. Literature also pointed out that there was a great deal of how care was provided with broad lenses of legislation targeting disadvantaged and disabled persons. Initially, disability almost meant inability, but the advent of the Old Poor Law (1601) proved otherwise (Charlesworth, 2010). From then, disadvantaged people became a center of attraction for both governments and later after government bills for disadvantaged people outpaced resources, the burden was then shifted to individuals and organizations as well as organized communities. As times moved, more sophisticated laws and policies were birthed for instance the Poor Law Amendment (1834) as there was a need to assist vulnerable communities. To date, numerous acts and policies are in place trying to improve the well-being of the disabled and disadvantaged people in communities. The capacity of these communities to cater to the needs of user groups it’s also another term that deserves attention on its own. Chaskin (2001) defines community capacity as “the interaction of human capital, organizational resources, and social capital existing within a given community that can be leveraged to solve collective problems, and improve or maintain the well-being of that community”. While ‘Service users’ on the other hand were defined by Cambridge and McCarthy (2001) as traditionally excluded and marginalized groups or groups of individuals who voice their opinions and participate in service development and are therefore a potentially powerful tool for communicating experiences that would otherwise remain hidden. The capacity of communities to deal with the needs of excluded and marginalized groups of people has been under intense research in the health, social care, and communities at large. This paper discussed the capacity of communities to address the various needs of disabled people in Africa particularly Zimbabwe.
The reason why Chaskin’s definition of community’s capacity was heavily borrowed in this paper is that it rightfully mentioned that the idea of communities to be capacitated rests on the fact that the resources, human capital, and social capital should be used to leverage and solve community problems as well as improving or maintaining the well-being of that community. This definition resonates well with the issue under this essay’s discussion. Therefore, it can be argued that if certain groups of people in the community need help, then they qualify as user groups and the community with its capacity should rescue such members by providing services they need not only for present consumption or use but also through capacitating them so that they will be able to independently stand alone in future and be in a better position to withstand social and economic challenges. In Africa, particularly Zimbabwe, there is a very big problem of exclusion of disabled persons in many aspects of the economy, society, and even environment which among others includes but is not limited to the provision of disabled persons’ toiler facilities like health care, social care, public transport, lifts, education, work opportunities yet disability does not mean inability. Therefore, a number of these disabled persons due to the failure of communities to provide for their needs, then become a burden either to the nation or to other family members or become incapacitated in terms of their social and economic future. However, the task of examining if a society does or cannot meet the needs of user groups is not as easy as what many people might think or present. Several studies reported the complexity associated with this task.
Communities have roles to play in the provision of the needs and services required by marginalized and excluded people from say health and social care policy development and planning points of view. Yepez et al (2012) reiterated that even though strong emphasis in literature has preached the gospel of individuals, organized groups and communities play a role in all initiatives which were related to community capacity building from health, social care, and well-being, the main argument of their involvement was pivoted on the fact that, for these community programs to be effective, there should be some involvement of the people to which a program is intended so as for them to have a say in the core designing and implementation of the interventions since people’s participation depends on the value the ought to derive out and how much-derived values are linked to their expectations, visions, and missions (Jackson et al, 2003 as cited in Yapez et al, 2012). Community participation is beneficial in the provision of these health and social care services particularly in the development, implementation, and evaluation of these service provisions (Haldane, et al. 2019). What probably needs to be also mentioned is that the involvement of the community should be substantiated by very strong organizational and community processes.
The most common role of the community in health and social care provision is that key people should be chosen amongst these communities to keep programs continuing to run and more importantly its involvement will result in the production of repeatable models of problem-solving through the inclusion of members of the community in identifying their problems and proposing practical possible solutions which will best proffer remedies to existing problems in their communities. Community engagement will go straight to the heart of the problem since it will assist in developing strategies that will address the society’s problem as well as in assisting policymakers in policy development.
In addition to supporting high-level policies, such as those that address structural inequities (e.g., residential segregation), community-based solutions ensure diverse approaches to improving community health equity and well-being. Such diverse approaches also are a manifestation of the fact that not all communities start out observing the unfair differences in life expectancy between one side of town and another and thereafter seek to address those inequities. Some communities aim to improve high school graduation expand affordable housing or create jobs.
Effective community support has both pros and cons. As the community tries to provide support to disabled and less privileged persons as was witnessed by Yepez et al (2012) it is not as straightforward as what literature has made us believe. Effective community support has complexities and a fair portion of challenges.
One of the most critical issues which was raised by Lopez et al. (2012) is that these projects which are targeted at community building and self-sufficiency will be guises through which the government reduces its accountability with costs of social ills as these community capacity-building programs will be channelized towards evil things such as gaining political mileage by politicians and other scrupulous government officials using the name capacity building ( Mowbray, 2005). This opportunism redirects the focus and root cause of the program from the larger causes of narrowing social-economic lacuna.
Another misconception is embedded in the term community as it was defined by various prior researchers. The term community carries with it a very dangerous underlying assumption that it consists of individuals, organized groups, or communities who share homogenous characteristics or who can be viewed as a social unit with similar interests. There are serious cultural complexities that do exist in these communities. The word community is just a romantic term that depicts oneness in theory whilst reality shows us that several communities are composed of heterogenous people who might have difficulty satisfying their needs and requirements owing to conflict of interests.
Not only community support in the provision of the needed support by the disabled persons will make the program successful. There is a great need for multi-agency working and partnership in the task of providing support to disabled persons. Multiple workgroups and partnerships are very crucial amongst professionals, self-organized groups, and individuals in the provision of support to disabled people in society. SCIE (2010) concurred with this notion citing the associated additional virtues of involving professionals as timeously provision of services as well as quality. These multi-agencies ensure that disabled persons are not susceptible to both social and economic threats. These collaborations are normally used in information sharing, providing much-needed support, and safeguarding disabled persons (SCIE,2010). In another study done by McConkey (2005), multi-agency working was seen to have more benefits than costs. Young et al, (2004) clearly outlined the main tasks for which multi-agency was developed which included lack of effective support for vulnerable persons, and multi-agency was created with specific arms to meet the identified needs of these groups.
Another reason for multiple-agency development was triggered by the much-increased demand for professionals owing to the ever-increasing population. The multiple-agency came as a way of providing much-needed services to vulnerable families through community carers who were jointly trained by professionals (Young et al, 2004). More broadly, multiple- agencies are there to summarise, standardize, or simplify issues relating to disabled persons’ services are concerned.
Conclusively, it is worth noting that as communities are developing the capacity to cater to the needs of disadvantaged people in society, care should be considered especially on issues to do with the constituents parts of the community since the essay reviewed that the word ‘community’ as it is being used in community health and care is too romantic and it ignores complexities associated with different categories of groups and individuals in these groups. Again, if governments want the targeted groups identified in the community to be beneficiaries of community support without being short-changed, there is a strong need to keep politicians away from resources earmarked for the support of the disabled persons in the community.
Lessons were also learned that multiple agencies are so crucial in the process of provision of the said services to the beneficiaries since these groups actively assist in the timely provision of services as well as information sharing, counseling, and providing basic care in support of the professionals.
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