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Understanding Ageing: Images, Attitudes and Professional Practice. - book reviews

Age and Ageing, May, 1994 by Wally Harbert

Simon Biggs

Buckingham: Open University Press. 1993. 195 pp. Price [pound]13.99 (paperback).

The message of this book is that the quality of care provided for elderly people is largely dependent on attitudes towards ageing which lie buried in the psyches of professional carers. Younger people tend to have a negative view of old age and, as they grow older, they are inclined to hang on to the label of middle age well into retirement, believing that true old age, with its negative overtones, belongs to an even older age group.

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The last three chapters are particularly helpful in describing the kind of influences that affect the judgement of professionals--including the fact that many of them prefer to be in the business of cure rather than care. For completeness, the author finds himself extending the debate into sexist issues, racism and professional power. Unfortunately, the early chapters are not easy to read since they are peppered with words which, for most of us, are unfamiliar, or downright ugly. 'Gerontized', 'facticity', 'commonsensuality', 'totalized', 'finitude', and 'cusp' are not part of everyday discourse.

Like other observers, Simon Biggs attacks recent changes in community care without explaining whether he thinks the former system was better. 'Community care and case management', he says, 'have already been defined as enhancing user choice, while conspicuously avoiding so doing'. For many of us, the potential for offering up to [pound]2.5 billion a year to elderly people for a range of services instead of restricting it to residential care seems like extending choice.

WALLY HARBERT Director of Planning and Development, Help the Aged

Health Care Industry

Understanding Ageing: Images, Attitudes and Professional Practice. - book reviews

Age and Ageing, May, 1994 by Wally Harbert

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