Delivering Home-Based Services

Delivering Home-Based Services offers a comprehensive and practical resource for understanding the historical and contemporary contexts of community home-based services. The strengths of this book include attention to services across the life span, fields of practice, populations and age groups, and coverage of theoretical issues, empirical research, and guidelines for practice. -- Betty J. Kramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Social Work This work is long overdue! Susan F. Allen and Elizabeth M. Tracy have brought home-based services to the forefront, where they need to be. The editors and their contributors have done an exceptional job of presenting the complexities involved in home-based services, emphasizing critical policy issues and the need to listen to consumer voices with lessons learned from research and practitioners. This volume is exemplary in its establishment of a foundation for home service provision for the most vulnerable of our clients. Administrators, program directors, researchers, and practitioners will find in this substantive range of chapters the necessary essentials for building a sound orientation for practice. -- Anita Lightburn, Fordham Graduate School of Social Service

Service providers are increasingly called upon to serve clients at home, a setting even a seasoned professional can find difficult to negotiate. From monitoring the health of older populations to managing paroled offenders, preventing child abuse, and reunifying families, home-based services require models that ensure positive outcomes and address the ethical dilemmas that might arise in such sensitive contexts. The contributors to this volume are national experts in diverse fields of social work practice, policy, and research. Treating the home as an ecological setting that guides human development and family interaction, they present rationales for and overviews of evidence-based models across an array of populations and fields of practice. Part 1 provides historical background and contemporary applications for home-based services, highlighting ethical, administrative, and supervision issues and summarizing the social policies that shape service delivery. Part 2 addresses home-based practice in such fields as child and adult mental health, school social work, and hospice care, detailing the particular population being treated, the policy and agency context, theories and empirical data, and practice guidelines. Part 3, the editors present a unifying framework and suggest future directions for home-based social work.