PRINCIPLE OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE

Principle of Health and Social Care

Principle of Health and Social Care

3.1

Social care and health care exist to serve the population who are experiencing a need they cannot fulfil themselves. These needs can be vast and many, but the one thing they all have in common is that the individual is having a difficulty maintaining a certain quality of life until those needs are met or resolved. Social care and health care address these needs with the understanding that these individuals cannot fix the problem themselves, and thus are in need of specialized assistance. Many theories exist that attempt to explain why these needs are so varied and how many variable factors can affect how these needs should be addressed. Human growth and development can have a profound impact on how health and social care organisations must meet the challenges presented to them in the care of their s/users. Some theories on the development of children might clarify some aspects of why adults behave a certain way later in life when in need of social and health care.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss psychology and is thought of as a “constructivist” theorist, which postulates that children learn best through activity and exploration. It is on this theory that the Montessori school system was developed, which emphasises hands on activity and first-hand experience when teaching children. Piaget developed his theories on child development by observing his own three children and testing various learning methods on them. From observation of his own children, he developed certain stages in which children are thought to learn. In the “Sensory motor” stage between the ages of new-born and two years old, children learn through the sense and through movement. They are little scientists, testing new encounters with a trial and error method, learning by making numerous mistakes until the correct way is discovered. A child at this stage is egocentric and more or less incapable of empathizing with anyone else. It does not occur to the child that other experience the same thoughts and feelings he does, or that he might have an effect on those thoughts and feelings of others. This begins to change between the ages of two and seven, although the child is still egocentric and starts to believe that objects have thoughts and feelings as he begins to learn empathy.

In the “Animism” stage, the child learns the use of abstract thinking in symbols, especially while playing, as boxes can become cars in the child's imagination, and learns numbers and letters can form words. The child believes what his immediate senses tell him, but is unable to easily visualize such things as large numbers or capacities, like the concept of “infinity.” A child at this stage wants to know what the last number ever counted is, and doesn't understand that one can never stop counting. The child also does not understand the concept of conservation, or saving something for later. Saving money in a piggy bank is a habit, ...