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Being a care manager means having a number of skills ranging from assessing clients to budget handling within the department. Social workers generally feel that they are the best people to be care managers, particularly since local authorities are often not passing budget responsibility to the care manager level. It is generally thought that other health workers such as pyschiatric nurses while skilful in their own fields are better at providing care and do not possess the networking and organisational skills required.

Community service users will have to play a much greater role in the training of community care practitioners if these practitioners are to participate with service users and ensure that they get the services which they require. Guidance for the more extensive use of service users in training has been developed by CCETSW's community care programme, and deals with issues such as no longer viewing service users as dependent. Practitioners who have greater contact with service users in a training situation will benefit from having their sense of self-esteem boosted and gaining new skills.