Rethinking Community, Medicalization, Social and Health Care: A Foucauldian Analysis

Social care and health services are fundamental issues used to situate the aging identities that people who require such services in occidental societies. Both contain changing vehicles that arbitrate relations between older people and health and social care professionals underpinned by politics and policy and the communities they live in and the interactions with family members and friends. However, they also represent an increase in professional power that can be exerted on old age, and thus, the deep layers of meanings associated with that part of understanding aging. The article presents a analytical framework based on a critical re-interpretation of the work of critical French philosopher Michel Foucault as applied to aging, care and health in communities and impact on families and informal carers. It identifies the interrelationship between care managerialism and older people in terms of a conceptual understanding of medicalization and surveillance and the crucial point is that they are relevant in theorizing power relations between health and care professionals and older people under the rubric of new policies such as integrated care. However, health spending still dominates and social care is chronically under funded, highlighting a huge disparity in policy domains of what is said and what is delivered. Post BREXIT, it is possible it will become clear that the funding for social care from the Boris Johnson administration (2019-) in the UK will fit with the neo-liberal project of putting the emphasis on care onto families, informal carers in communities and older people themselves.

Keywords: medicalization; old age; surveillance, health and care.