Needs assessment, street-level bureaucracy and the new community care

In the wake of the Seebohm reforms of the personal social services, a numbe r of studies were carried out in the 1970s to explore the role of frontline professionals in identifying and meeting social need. A common finding was that social workers behaved like "street-level bureaucrats': using their d iscretionary authority defensively to manage an otherwise overwhelming work load. In the 1990s, top-down assessment and care management systems were pu t in place as part of community care reforms. Their aim was to reduce the s cope of professional discretion so as to standardize responses to need and control demand according to resources available. In this paper, the authors consider the success of new systems in controlling "bottom-up" decision-ma king by drawing on a recent empirical study of needs assessment practice in three types of social work team, They point out that the assessment practi ce of those teams facing the highest bombardment rates was most obviously c riteria-driven, reinforced by the use of new technology. Rather than creati ng informal stereotypes to manage demand, social workers could mobilize leg itimate forms of rationing to protect their time and other resources. ret t he sense of professional identity, the level of frontline autonomy, and the ways in which this was exercised, varied across the different types of tea m. The authors conclude, therefore, that the scope of discretionary space a vailable to frontline staff in social services departments, and the practic es lo which it giver rise, are empirical questions only adequately addresse d by methodologies able to connect with "bottom-up" decision-making.