Maintaining a balance between managing and assessing risk and upholding the required high standards of practice in health and social care can be demanding, particularly in the current climate of increased preoccupation with the difficult tensions between rights, protection and risk-taking. Good Practice in Assessing Risk is a comprehensive guide to good practice for those working with risk, covering a wide variety of health, social care and criminal justice settings including child protection, mental health, work with sex offenders and work with victims of domestic violence. The contributors...

The companion volume to Good Practice in Risk Assessment 1 looks at further issues in the field of risk assessment. Managers are under increasing pressure to predict risk accurately, and face serious consequences for failure. This new collection explores the arguments and means of assessment in a clear and accessible manner and with a practice-based emphasis. The contributors consider subjects as varied as child adoption, violence, mental health, alcohol and suicide in a wide range of social care settings, all linked by the difficulty of accurately assessing risk.

Empowerment of users of social care services has become a key issue in much current social work and social policy literature. However, many of these texts have defined participation narrowly, and consequently user involvement has been restricted to influencing the decisions of front-line workers, with little participation in policy making at senior management level. This book explores strategies for effectively involving users in the planning, delivery and evaluation of services. How the key concepts of empowerment, participation and user involvement have been applied in important areas such...