Towards an explanation of the corruption of care

The last 20 years have seen a long series of scandals in long-stay hospitals, children's homes, elderly person's homes and other caring institutions. There have been many lengthy enquiries, but there has been no attempt at a generalised exploration of why it is that caring services and institutions 'go wrong'. In this article, we attempt an explanation of what we call the corrup tion of care, We set out eight propositions about systems and patterns of organisation which we see as playing a part in this corruption. Each proposition is illustrated by evidence from researchf (1) on the pindown scandal. The focus of the paper is primarily on explaining the corrup tion of care. We use pindown simply because of the topicality and importance of that issue and because, one of us (JW) had been researching in that area.