Book Review: Quality at Home for Older People: Involving Service Users in Defining Home Care Specifications

Abstract

users affected by the fall of communism or of civil war, and life in restrictive health and welfare institutions. This regional perspective highlights the relevance of narratives in passing on users' knowledge to professionals. Her text illustrates both how much social work has in common and how different the concrete challenges can be.Together, these three books form a good reading pack on social work education in East and West. Social problems at macro and micro level, the dayto-day delivery of courses and curriculum-related collaboration between East and West are equally well documented, as are various strands of theoretical work. There is evidence both of commonalities and discrepancies, and those looking for factual information will also find much of interest. Readers will, however, have to put up with stylistic heterogeneity, especially in Chytil and Seibel (1999). Information may be a bit more difficult to extract from some sources than from others, but, all in all, the exercise is a worthwhile one.As J. Szmagalski (in Marynowicz-Hetka et al., 1999: 233) notes, 'political, social and economic differences among the countries and regions of Europe result in a variety of issues facing local social services and social workers. But there are also common challenges for all social workers'. It is about finding the right balance between recognizing the common core while respecting diversity. The need to recognise the knowledge and expertise of social work in the East, demonstrated in a previous conference publication, Connelly and Stubbs (1997), has received powerful confirmation here. References