Chapter 1: Scenes from residential work.

In this article, the author discusses five scenes from residential work, which have been drawn from his own experience. He has chosen these particular events and situations because they cover a wide area and exemplify the complex and pressing demands that the work makes on people. They relate directly to all the subsequent chapters, in which the issues raised by the stories are discussed in detail. The scenes broaden further to illustrate the wider political and organizational encompassments that so crucially affect residential care, ostensibly sustaining, but all too often hindering, the accomplishment of the primary task. In one of the scenes discussed, the author describes about twenty minutes of an evening's work of two staff in a large, traditionally run, old people's home. Inglewood, in the London Borough of Lambeth was reorganized over the five years since the time of this account to become a much more attractive and useful institution, with many different supportive functions, operating in smaller units, staffed by integrated teams of workers, and existing as part of a neighborhood network of services for pensioners.