Recent legislative and policy changes in adult social care have refocused attention on 15 a strengths-based approach to social work practice. The Care Act 2014 advocates a more inclusive and holistic understanding of individual well-being, which is evident by its expectation of more personalised responses to safeguarding. Family Group Conferences (FGCs) fit well with this policy shift but require further exploration before being integrated into work with adults. A fictitious case study was analysed through 20 an organic group discussion, during which the authors applied their professional expertise to explore the appropriateness of FGCs to provide a response to adultsafeguarding cases. FGCs provide a viable alternative to traditional decision-making approaches in the adult-safeguarding field. The case analysis exposes three main areas that require further consideration to ensure effective implementation. The areas iden-25 tified are divided into mental capacity, risk and funding. It is important that policy makers and local authorities acknowledge the complexity of transferring an approach originally designed for working with children and families to the context of social work with older adults. More effort should be made to address the practice tensions
This chapter explores the legislative context for family group conferences (FGCs) in both the UK and across the globe. While FGCs do not have a legislative mandate in the UK, with the exception of Northern Ireland, legislation and subsequent policy lends itself to the FGC approach and indeed in some cases recommends the use of FGCs as best practice. Meanwhile, very few countries across the globe have a legislative mandate for FGCs. What is clear, particularly from the field of children's social care, is that FGCs have been effectively applied in a legislative context to divert children away from care proceedings and from local authority care. Moreover, service evaluations for those FGC services that are using FGCs in an adult social care context have highlighted that FGCs have been an effective tool for decision-making and planning for vulnerable adults, including adult safeguarding cases.
Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.
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