Case management in community care services: organizational responses

This paper reports and examines case management arrangements developed and employed by the 28 Care in the Community pilot projects,1 which were evaluated by a PSSRU team including Martin Knapp, Corinne Thomason, Jeni Beecham, Robin Darton and Caroline Allen. It follows an overview of case management by Judy Renshaw in 1988 (BJSW, Vol. 18, Supplement), and starts with a description of how projects handled the core tasks of case management and the wide variety of patterns which emerged. This is followed by an analysis and interpretation of delivery arrangements in the context of the organizational and operational variety encountered. It concludes with some key lessons for case-managed community services, based on the experiences of the pilot projects.