Consensus, collaboration and community care for elderly people TurrellAdrian R. 2013 The Thesis was stimulated by experiences of statutory carers as a volunteer supporting elderly people living in the community, My observations of these carers (such as social workers, district nurses, home helps and G.P.s) and the support they provided to elderly people in the community suggested that there was a fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, their avowal of the virtue of maintaining elderly people at home for as long as possible (in the 'spirit' of community care policy) and, on the other hand, their ability and willingness to collaborate to achieve this end, To explain this situation, this Thesis explores three aspects of the theory and practice of community care for elderly people: • the historical and conceptual diversity of community care policies in England and Wales as revealed by government publications over the period 1800-1982 and a range of professional and academic literature; • the degree to which community care policies have been officially regarded as dependent upon inter-agency and inter-professional collaboration, and whether in practice community care practitioners have lent such policies their support and agreed on their meaning and implications; • I the relevance of these two aspects to implementing local community care policies. Prior to examining these three aspects some assumptions were made about community care policy, In terms of the first aspect, it was assumed that con1munity care was a comparatively recent (post Second World War) policy movement away from institutional care, and that as such I it was a relatively simple and coherent policy, In terms of the second aspect, the assumptions were that community care was indeed dependent upon the collaboration of statutory community carers, and that these carers did commonly support community care policy. In terms of the third aspect, in the context of the public sector expenditure constraints of the early 1980's, it was assumed that resource constraints acted as the main barrier to the delivery of local community care services to elderly people.