In the United States, the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) has been one of the principal foci in the fight against human trafficking during the past decade with billions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of helping professionals trained in anti-trafficking best practices. Despite this attention, prosecutions, convictions and rescues have been scarce relative to funding, leading critical scholars to argue that CSEC is a moral panic. The following article, based on fourteen months of participant-observation between 2009 and 2010 with social service providers, law enforcement officials, not-for-profit directors and local clergy from a voluntary participation federal anti-trafficking taskforce in Atlantic City, New Jersey provides an ethnographic account of the ways that helping professionals confront the challenges and contradictions of implementing policy and advocating for an invisible target population that is rarely, if ever, visible in their work lives.

This article discusses the use of privacy and freedom of information legislation in relation to the release of care-leavers’ records in the Australian state of Victoria. First, it explains the relevance of privacy and freedom of information legislation to care-leavers’ access to records, that is that the subject of a record is entitled to access information held about them, subject to certain exemptions. Second, based on research interviews with care-leavers and record-holders, the article then discusses how the legislation is understood in practice and the difficulties that arise in determining what information can be released, particularly in relation to ‘third party data’ and ‘unreasonable disclosure’. Finally, the article considers how policy in this area could be improved to enhance the release of records.

Governments often provide some form of social assistance to vulnerable groups. The right to social security is enshrined in the South African Constitution and the Social Assistance Act 13 of 2004. The country provides for a child support grant to single parents or caregivers who are low-income earners. The impact of the child support grant on teenage pregnancy in South Africa has aroused interest in the last couple of years, sparking debate that it may be encouraging teenage pregnancy. However, empirical evidence has been produced to confirm this relationship. This study examines the relationship between receiving the child support grant and being pregnant with another child in two national data sets using logistic regression analysis and empirical data. The results indicate that teenagers who receive the child support grant are significantly less likely to be pregnant with another child compared with teenagers who do not receive the child support grant.

This article calls for a more nuanced understanding of the links between the motivations, trajectories and policy environments of community asset organisations and the geographies of their social impact. While potential for the ownership of physical assets by place-based community organisations can be found in new localism powers in all four jurisdictions of the UK, there may be differences in policy articulation and implementation that enable or limit the social benefits community asset organisations are thought to deliver. Furthermore, community assets are premised on their intrinsic tie and value to place, with social cohesion, communal mobilisation and identification of mutual interest thought to be at their heart. This article reviews research in this field set in relation to recent policy developments, and identifies an important need to better understand how the personal and social geographies of impact are delivered in, and influenced by, different spatial contexts and political frameworks.

Medicare is the most important publicly financed insurance programme in the US, with an annual budget at $500 billion or higher. It covers the majority of the inpatient, outpatient and prescription drugs expenditures of the seniors from age sixty-five until death. Using nationally representative data of current Medicare beneficiaries, this study estimated the dynamic relationship among gender, race, body weight, height, longevity, and lifetime Medicare expenditure. Next, we projected the trajectories of the total financial influence of demographic and biological changes in retirees on Medicare in the future. We found the increasing proportion of African Americans will lead to disproportionately lower lifetime Medicare expenditures per capita, due to racial disparities in longevity and access to outpatient care, but expect such disparities to decrease in the future. We also found the financial burden of obesity could be magnified by the increasing obesity rates among the white population.

This themed section has at its heart reflections on the development of policy of, and for, information in health and social care over the last ten years in both the UK and Australia. It addresses a set of concerns often overlooked within social policy, namely the use of information and information systems as tools by organisations, policy makers and practitioners in the modernisation or transformation of public services, including in this case health and social care. Not long ago, in both countries, information was perceived as a panacea for the problems of integrating care services between health and social care organisations and these organisations and the patient, client or user of services. The authors focus upon England and Australia and contrast them briefly with other countries in Europe where the state plays a range of roles in the provision of health and social care.

This review article offers a brief comparative overview of approaches to the application of public sector information systems in England and Australia, with particular reference to health and social care. Since the 1990s, reforms to the public sector in both countries have looked to information and communication technologies (ICTs) from the private sector as the key to modern, citizen-centred services. These efforts have been conducted in the wider context of New Public Management, with the emphasis on the marketisation of government services, reducing the size of the state, and improvements in efficiency. Both countries are typically seen as being at, or near, the forefront of the digital transformation of public services (United Nations, 2012; McLoughlin and Wilson, 2013). Moreover, there is a shared history of experimentation, most recently in the shaping of the information agendas around records and personalisation.

There is widespread consensus that current healthcare costs are unsustainable, and that efficiencies could be achieved by reorganising care and making greater use of information technology, in particular nationally available electronic health records. Such approaches have, however, been difficult to implement, partly because incentives for uptake are weak. In this article we argue that the difficulties go deeper than calculations of costs and benefits, and include disruptions to the complex moral orders that surround the production and exchange of health information. Using the introduction of national electronic health records in England and Australia as examples, we show how attempts to reshape and transfer distributions of rights and responsibilities developed in the age of paper into the digital world go awry. We suggest that a fundamental rethinking of the role of ‘records’ in healthcare may be an integral component of the moral re-ordering required to transform health care through such means.

Social care policy is actively promoting integrated and personalised care. Local organisations are starting to re-engineer their business processes, review front line practice, develop new operational tools and revise their information systems to support and deliver these new approaches. This article draws on a study undertaken in one local organisation as it began to implement its response to these expectations. It uses structuration theory to explore how the macro agendas described by policy and legislation are translated into local perspectives and then further refracted through the lens of operational practice, shaping the business tools which deliver the change. The evidence suggests that there needs to be a better understanding of how the expectations of policy are interpreted – and potentially distorted – through their translation into local practice, and of the role that information and information services play in enabling, or disabling the delivery of those expectations at the front line.

Client and patient-centred care have become watchwords in policies to transform social and health care systems in both Australia and the UK. In this article we argue that much of the success of moves towards client-centred social care will rest on the creation of appropriate informational environments to support new conversations between clients and those who commission and provide care services. We draw upon original research within an existing state-level insurance-based scheme covering citizens who acquire a disability in transport accidents to illustrate the problems faced by the absence of such a framework. We highlight some of the insights emerging from our work concerning the challenge of developing appropriate informational environments to support client-centred care and indicate the potential of co-design when focused on new conversations of care.

Based on research in Australia, this article offers explanatory concepts about how welfare workers deal with contradictions between the rationalising ‘informationalisation’ of welfare system governance and the demands of people-centred welfare practice, or ‘technologies of care’. While the situation in Australia with respect to the relationship between government, funders and welfare workers may not be mirrored in other places, the concepts are relevant for the development of local research, insights and practice.

Suggestions are also made for further action to bridge the gap between information systems design and welfare practice through the adoption of a dialogic and representational system for more effective interoperable design that reflects the needs of the major parties involved, including funders, designers and particularly welfare workers.