Health and social care

Assistant Editor-In-Chief: Michelle Lew

Overview
In the UK, Health and Social Care is a broad term that relates to integrated services that are available from health and social care providers. It can also mean a range of vocational and academic courses which can be taken at various academic and vocational levels from GNVQ, A-Level, NVQ, to degrees.

As a subject discipline, Health and Social Care (H&SC) combines elements of sociology, biology, nutrition, law, and ethics. Typically, students of Health and Social Care will have a work placement alongside their academic studies; such a placement may take place in a nursery, residential home, hospital, or other caring establishment. Others may take a health and social care course as a route to further qualifications hoping that it will lead to employment within the sector.

Depending on their qualification, students may start off as care assistants and develop care pathways to become doctors, nurses, social workers, physiotherapists, counsellors, psychotherapists, Paramedics or a range of other related occupations.

H&SC can be studied in schools and colleges from Key Stage 4/GCSE Level (age 14-16), colleges and can also be studied in some universities.

Subject content
The subject content of H&SC is vast, and will vary depending upon the level at which it is being studied, and the individual qualification. Most students of H&SC will cover areas such as:

Biology
The biological aspect of H&SC is vital: with many careers it will form the most important area of their knowledge. Students need to be aware of how people grow and develop physically, and they may also be required to study a range of illnesses and treatments.

This may include the study of public health, and public health campaigns; for example, the effects of smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise, to name a few.

Nutrition
Nutrition may form an integral part of some H&SC courses, especially in situations where carers will be primarily responsible for creating and implementing diets for care service users. This area of study will usually also include specialist diets for diabetics, Muslims, vegetarians, lactose-intolerant and other unusual diets.

Law and social policy
Students need a good grounding in the legal aspects of what is required of care practitioners, and will need to have up-to-date knowledge of developments in social policy, as well as knowledge of the various laws regarding rights, discrimination, abuse, welfare, and so on.

Ethics
Ethics is one of the most important areas of H&SC: it is not enough that care professionals know how to treat illnesses and to help individuals; carers also require the integrity and honesty to put their knowledge into practice fairly and justly.

Care workers are governed by the care value base, a system of ethics which promotes equal opportunities and fairness in the treatment of individuals. Carers must not discriminate against people on the grounds of race, gender, age, nationality, sexuality, religion, health status, or any other grounds, and so students of H&SC need to learn about anti-discrimination laws.

Carers also need to be able to help individuals who feel they have been treated unfairly, or who do not have access to care services for some reason.

Social and educational activities
Ideally, care workers need to make care environments not merely tolerable, but enjoyable and fulfilling for the clients; this might involve carrying out social and educational activities with those in care. Students of H&SC will need to learn about how to run games, activities, reading groups, excursions and so on, so that the people receiving care get the most out of it as they possibly can.