Care management and information provision: Towards a reasoned method of assessing the range and extent of problems and needs in child-care social work

The new managerialism associated with care management has, as with other ar eas of health and welfare work, promoted ideas of efficient use of resource s, quality assurance and the capacity to audit the work of welfare agencies . This approach places a high premium on measurement, and emphazises a long -standing desire to develop instruments the use of which would provide the basis for resource allocation. This paper presents a method by which such d ata can be rigorously generated and analysed. It uses as its basis an instr ument of established reliability and validity, designed to collect data on problems identified in clients in the child and family care social work gro up. It uses a combination of principal component and cluster analysis to pr ovide a clear picture of the nature and range of problems and the grouping of cases with similar characteristics. These data provide a quantitative ba sis upon which judgements about resource allocation can be made.