Towards the Development of a Learning Model that Integrates the Social Structural Causes Of Clients’ Needs in to Social Care Practice.

The research challenges certain assumptions about social care practice. These assumptions are that clients’ care needs can be treated through a care plan, which ignores the structural factors contributing to the client’s need in the first instance. There is belief in the profession, emanating in the main from the discipline of therapeutic care, that the wider social-structural causes of illness and diseases, though interesting as context, are not part of the overall treatment plans. This is incorrect.The research attempts to reflect a holistic teaching practice arising from proposed research on the needs of a variety of social care clients. The research will focus on detailed case-studies and life histories of social care clients in the areas of: homelessness drug abuse and young offenders, working in close co-operation with Fr. Peter Mc Verry.The manual could be a tool used for the co-facilitation of integrated lectures or the design of sample care plans incorporating the different strands of the holistic approach, which could ultimately result in the delivery of interventions having a multidisciplinary focus.This research will provide a learning manual utilised by teachers and students, which will seek to challenge certain current underlying assumptions in regard to social care education and practice. Social care education and practice heretofore, does not adequately acknowledge the societal causes of social care clients’ care needs. The assumption is that this is outside the scope of the profession. The work of Prof. Mike Oliver and this researchchallenges this assumption. This research seeks to demonstrate the centrality of the social structural failure in addressing holistic care priorities for client, moving it away from the assumption, that care is an individualised act predominantly.