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Why, despite the universalist aspiration of the British welfare state, was institutional care for poor older people so frequently condemned as inferior? This article seeks an answer in the period before 1945, when local government reform might potentially have raised quality. It adopts a regional case study approach, arguing that this permits access to relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence obscured in national sources, and that concentration on urban experience has hitherto produced a distorted picture. It finds that in contrast to the expansive municipal medical services targeted at the broader population, in this area the assumptions, administrative structures and material inheritance of the Poor Law impeded change and constrained resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a critical discussion of recent work on local government health care and health services in interwar England. A literature review examines case study approaches and comparative quantitative surveys, highlighting conventional and revisionist interpretations. Noting the differing selection criteria evident in some works, it argues that studies based upon a limited number of personal health services provide an insufficient basis for assessing local health activity and policy. There follows a regional study demonstrating various discrepancies between health financing data in local sources and those in nationally collated returns. These in turn give rise to various problems of assessment and interpretation in works relying on the latter, particularly with respect to services for schoolchildren and long-stay patients. The case study points to the importance of integrating poor law medical services in evaluations, and of learning more about the role of government subsidy in supporting expanding services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between deprivation and health and educational inequalities has been well evidenced in the literature. Recent UK research has now established a similar social gradient in child welfare interventions (Bywaters et al. 2018) with children living in the most deprived areas in the UK facing a much higher chance of being placed on the child protection register or in out-of-home care. There is an emerging narrative that poverty has become the wallpaper of practice, "too big to tackle and too familiar to notice" (Morris et al. 2018) and invisible amid lack of public support and political will to increase welfare spending. This paper will examine poverty-related inequalities and how these affect families. It will discuss the importance of recognising that poverty is a social justice issue and a core task for social work and outline the range of supports that may be available for families to help lift them out of poverty. Finally, it will describe the development of a new practice framework for social work in Northern Ireland that challenges social workers to embed anti-poverty approaches in their practice. The framework emphasises that poverty is a social justice issue, seeks to provide practical support and guidance to re-focus attention, debate, and action on poverty in times of global economic uncertainty and give social workers the tools to make it central to their practice once again. It reinforces the need for social workers to understand and acknowledge the impact of poverty, and to advocate for and support those most in need. It aims to challenge and empower professionals to tackle poverty and inequality as an aspect of ethical and effective practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]