The main argument of this paper is that personal social services, including probation, at both a policy and practice level are increasingly focused on issues of risk. We postulate that risk assessment, risk management, the monitoring of risk and risk-taking itself are rapidly becoming the dominant raison d'être of such agencies, thus supplanting ideologies of meeting need or welfare provision. In turn they have become key to priority setting and rationing, the basis for organizational rationales and structures, the central focus for professional activity and accountability, and for measuring quality. Thus an analysis of risk as an organizing principle offers fundamental insights into the rapidly changing nature and organization of statutory social work and probation. There is very little literature that focuses on risk across the spectrum of services. Risk analysis, as such, is most developed in the criminal justice and child protection fields. However, the mental health literature, being centrally preoccupied with notions of dangerousness, is quickly adopting risk terminology. Apart from work on elder abuse, literature on child welfare and community care has been framed in terms of need, issues of risk only coming to the fore around potential admission to residential care. We contend that as issues of rationing and accountability become more dominant, so do concerns with risk. Thus we predict the extension of notions of risk as central organizing principles throughout the social services and probation.

This reflective paper assesses whether the focus of community care social work is shifting from responding to needs to reducing or containing risks. Whilst public response to unacceptable risk has instigated major developments in health and welfare services and an overt concern with risk management is a key feature in elder abuse and mental health work, notions of risk have featured less explicitly in the community care literature. This paper suggests that community care assessment is increasingly concerned with risk management, as containing risks becomes a means of rationing scarce resources, when situations of high risk attract more resources than those where the risk is less. In addition, this emphasis on only the negative connotations of risk and the need for protection may constrain empowering service users to define their own positive risks.

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The role of social work with vulnerable adults has changed markedly in many countries, including England and Wales following the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. The basis for this paper is a small qualitative study of the social work role in helping people entering residential or nursing care in the independent sector following an emergency hospital admission in England (Phillips and Waterson 1997). This double transition is an under-researched area (Bywaters 1993;Downs and Crossan 1999). Furthermore, the literature on hospital discharge to date relates to developing policy objectives (Department

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