Domiciliary Care Project Entry into Care

<p> This is an early report based on the first stage of the Domiciliary Care Project, a longitudinal survey of elderly people at the margin of, or receiving social services care. The Project is concerned with efficiency and effectiveness in services organisation and delivery. Without measures of outcomes of care at this first stage, it is not possible to apply an outcome based assessment of efficiency. Nevertheless, even at this stage it is evident that at the stage of entry into care there are a number of blockages which affect efficiency. The first concerns the extent to which social services are, for clients, an extension of the health care system, yet this is not properly reflected in joint working relations as field level. Secondly, the breakdown rate in relation to some services points to a disjunction between the overt and covert criteria in matchin services to meeds - to the avoidance of risk with the achievement of specific objectives.