by
Andries Baart and
Guus Timmerman
13th May 2025
In late modernity, health care and social work have increasingly come under pressure from rule-based systems derived from utilitarian, goal-directed, production-oriented and bureaucratic management models. These systems have their own merits, but they also burden the work that is being done with and for people within these institutions, by increasingly modelling this as the production of commodities.
Many professionals, as well as scholars, feel that this is problematic when thinking about what constitutes good care, help and support. Policy makers have also started to acknowledge that it’s problematic.
In this policy briefing, Andries Baart and Guus Timmerman, authors of Relational Caring and Presence Theory in Health Care and Social Work, examine how bureaucratic systems in modern care often conflict with the relational practices essential to compassionate support, and they formulate some implication for policy, based on their Care-Ethical Model of Quality Enquiry.
Download the PDF here
Relational Caring and Presence Theory in Health Care and Social Work by Andries Baart and Guus Timmerman is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £85.00.
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Image: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk.