What is Social Care?

A little introduction to social care.

What is social care?

You may not have heard of the term social care before, and that's understandable. Australia does not technically have a social care system. The United Kingdom has the best example of a social care system.

Social care is a broad umbrella term we give to services that contribute to someone's care, wellbeing or health, but which are not clinical health services. The best way to think about this is to first think about health care. Health care is a term that encompasses a number of services, including hospitals, allied health (e.g. physiotherapists), and general practitioners. These services tend to take a biomedical approach to health.

In comparison, social care may include services such as disability services, aged care services and community support services (e.g. Meals on Wheels). These services take a recovery orientated or support orientated approach to care. This means they are not so much focused on a 'cure' or 'fixing' a health issue, but rather supporting someone to live their life. Social care services could also include government services such as Centrelink, however, this could be grouped as a human or welfare service.

Social care is bigger than just services. Social care also captures the importance of the social world to our health. So, social care informatics at a population level is also interested in the types of data we collect to make sense of population health.

What is Social Care Informatics?

Social care informatics is simply put, an interest in information in the social care sector. This includes ways in which information is collected, shared and used. Unlike healthcare, where there have been decades of work in developing the health informatics space, social care informatics has had relatively little attention, especially outside the UK.