Health and Social Care

Health and Social Care is a broad term that relates to services that are available from health and social care providers. It includes statutory, private and voluntary organisations which offer help, support and provision in areas including:

• health such as GP’s, hospitals, family planning
• hospitals including community and mental health provision
• social services such as care services
• residential provision such as children’s homes or care homes
• outreach services such as independent living or mental health support
• community provision such as day centres 

As a subject discipline, Health and Social Care 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.  It could also include advocacy placements.

Advocacy usually plays an important part of most health and social care courses as 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 and welfare. 

Advocacy is also important as professional caregivers need to be able to support individuals who feel that they have been or are being treated unfairly, or who do not have access to appropriate care services for some reason. Questions of confidentiality, privacy, risk taking and generally the exercise of personal choice are all issues that can be dealt with by advocates and provision.

If you are a Health and Social Care practitioner who wants to develop advocacy skills – or you are a provider and want to nurture the advocacy skill of your team – please go to our section on bespoke courses for more information on our advocacy skills course.

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