Tim Dartington’s new book, ‘Managing Vulnerability’ explores the dynamics of care.  He argues that we know how to do it, but somehow we seem to keep getting it wrong.

In his words from the preface to his book: ‘Three years ago I wrote the editorial to an issue of the journal Dementia with the same title as this book, ‘Managing Vulnerability’. I concluded with a question: What are the conditions in which it is possible and acceptable to be vulnerable in our society and survive? This book is my contribution to addressing that question at a time of continuing uncertainties in local and global economic and political life.

Tim describes research over forty years in thinking why institutional and community care are both subject to processes of denial and fear of dependency. His examples include children in hospital, people with disabilities living in the community, and the care of older people and those with dementia. He asks why there has been such splitting between health and social care and what underlying purpose this split may have in a societal response to vulnerability and long-term dependency.

He asks pertinent questions, for instance:

• How do we look after those who cannot look after themselves?
• How do we marry the understanding of the unconscious, whether in the individuals or the group, with public notions of efficiency and effectiveness?
• How can we deal with the long-term dependency of an ageing population?
• What is the nature of change and how can it be brought about despite resistance?
• What is the primary task? What is leadership?

The book radically questions the current procedure-led and instrumental view of human service provision. It is hard-hitting in its informed and scholarly critique of current theory, policy and practice, but it is also deeply moving in its personal account of living with the same system while also managing dementia within the family (extracts taken from Dr Sebastian Kraemer introduction on the back cover and from the Series Editor’s Preface, Margot Waddell).

Tim Dartington is a writer and social scientist. He was a researcher at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the 1970s, working with Eric Miller and Izabel Menzies Lyth, and is now Associate of both the Tavistock Institute and the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. He has continued to carry out consultancy and research in health and social care from a systems psychodynamic perspective and has written on the organisational issues in the delivery of care.

Managing Vulnerability: The Underlying Dynamics of Systems of Care is available to purchase from Karnac Books.

Further details as downloadable PDF