Accommodating health and social care needs: routine resource allocation in stroke rehabilitation

This paper explores routine resource allocation processes in health and social care. While there has been a small body of work which has drawn on Lipsky's (1980) insights into street level bureaucracy, few have taken seriously the opportunity offered by ethnography to explore in detail the work of front-line staff as a way of observing policy processes in action. Utilising ethnographic data from research into the continuing care of adults who had suffered a first acute stroke, we analyse how staff accommodated patient need and consider the implications that this had for the quality, equality and equity of service provision.