Service providers are increasingly called upon to serve clients at home, a setting even a seasoned professional can find difficult to negotiate. From monitoring the health of older populations to managing paroled offenders, preventing child abuse, and reunifying families, home-based services require models that ensure positive outcomes and address the ethical dilemmas that might arise in such sensitive contexts. The contributors to this volume are national experts in diverse fields of social work practice, policy, and research. Treating the home as an ecological setting that guides human development and family interaction, they present rationales for and overviews of evidence-based models across an array of populations and fields of practice. Part 1 provides historical background and contemporary applications for home-based services, highlighting ethical, administrative, and supervision issues and summarizing the social policies that shape service delivery. Part 2 addresses home-based practice in such fields as child and adult mental health, school social work, and hospice care, detailing the particular population being treated, the policy and agency context, theories and empirical data, and practice guidelines. Part 3, the editors present a unifying framework and suggest future directions for home-based social work.

This popular and innovative core text book explores contemporary social work theories and perspectives in a systematic way, using an integrated and flexible framework to link context, theory, and practice approaches. Healy expertly provides an applied guide to social work theory across a range of organisational contexts, showing social work as a diverse activity that is profoundly shaped by professional purpose, public policy, and practice locations. This edition has been comprehensively updated to reflect developments in the contexts and theorising of social work practices. This is ideal reading to support and develop undergraduate and postgraduate students taking modules on Social Work Theories and Methods on qualifying professional programmes. Its international breadth and supportive pedagogical features have ensured the book's value to students of social work all over the world. New to this edition: - New sections on post-humanism and eco-social work - Coverage of a broader range of critical approaches including feminist and anti-racial social work - Additional practice exercises drawn from realistic case studies.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are widely used across organisations. But are they fully understood in how they can properly shape, improve, or even undermine organisational systems and outcomes? This book presents a framework and tools for measuring and managing performance at various levels within an organisation, and helps managers re-think the ways KPIs can be implemented to meet organisational goals. Innovative performance measurement and management is a vital function within any organisation irrespective of its size and industry. Measuring and managing performance (whether on an individual, team, or departmental basis) assists management in calibrating their established strategic goals by providing an insight into how well their employees and the organisation are doing and identifying areas of concern for rectification and improvement. This book focuses on the practicality of performance management tools (for example, Performance Analytics; Performance Reporting; Critical Success Factors; Balanced Scorecard; Benchmarking; Six Sigma; Business Excellence Models; Enterprise Risk Management) and illustrates their use, and the changing nature of how organisational performance will be evaluated in the future. This includes the application of Artificial Intelligence as an important trend in performance measurement and management. This book provides a universal framework for implementing a performance measurement and management system that is applicable to both the private and public sectors. It is particularly relevant to HR and operational managers, and organisational leaders and public administrators at all levels.

What is OSGi? Simply put, OSGi is a standardized technology that allowsdevelopers to create the highly modular Java applications that are required forenterprise development. OSGi lets you install, start, stop, update, or uninstallcomponents without taking down your entire system. The interest in OSGi basedapplications has exploded since major vendors like Sun, Spring, Oracle,BEA, and IBM have gotten behind the standard. OSGi in Action is a comprehensive guide to OSGi with two primary goals.First, it provides a clear introduction to OSGi concepts with examples that arerelevant both for architects and developers. Then, it explores numerous practicalscenarios and techniques, answering questions like: How much of OSGi doyou actually need? How do you embed OSGi inside other containers? What arethe best practices for moving legacy systems to OSGi? Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.