The Geriatric Worker in a Community Mental Health Clinic:

Special geriatrics services are now a reality in many community mental health clinics, thus making it timely for clinicians and administrators to look at the problems faced by geriatric workers in that setting. This article addresses the problems in the worker's role by first comparing it to those of other special population mental health workers. Systemic difficulties and structural problems of the job are examined with emphasis on the worker's experiences and feelings. The author contends that the worker's issues parallel those of elderly clients. Solutions for changing negative aspects of the separate service role are discussed and their impact on service delivery described.     

CLINICAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL GROUP WORK WITH THE DEAF

Social Group work with deaf clients is virtually non-existent although there is a need for it in the deaf community. The author describes some of the psychosocial factors that should be considered when working with the deaf, and some of the skills that social workers should have before attempting it. In addition, some of the author's own experiences in working with a group of deaf clients are described and related to the foregoing psychosocial factors.     

Climate change in Alaska: Social workers’ attitudes,beliefs, and experiences

The average temperature in Alaska and the North American Arctic has risen at twice the rate of the global average due to climate change, causing changes to the natural environment that affect the physical, social, and emotional well‐being of people and communities. Social workers must be prepared to respond. Using a non‐probability, convenience sample, this study surveyed 159 social workers in Alaska to assess their attitudes and their perceptions of the effects of climate change on their clients and constituents. Results indicate that social workers in Alaska believe that climate change is happening, that human activities are responsible, and that it is a large threat to people in Alaska. Over 75% believe that climate change is dangerous for their clients now or will be dangerous in 10 years. Social workers report that in the past year their clients or constituents have experienced multiple climate change‐related problems with community infrastructure, health, and mental health.     

Finding the right connections: Peer support within a community‐based mental health service

Gray M., Davies K., Butcher L. Finding the right connections: Peer support within a community‐based mental health service This article reports on a qualitative study that examined the organisational enablers and barriers to implementing peer support work in an Australian, rural, community‐based mental health service. Interviews with 19 peer and non‐peer staff were conducted to identify attitudes towards peer support and whether there were organisational values, practices and strategies that might support the implementation of peer support. The findings revealed that peer support workers were valued for their ability to build trusting connections with clients and to accept client choice in a non‐judgemental way. However, peer support workers tended to ‘fill service gaps’ within intensive, administrative case‐management environments. These findings highlight the importance of an organisational‐wide approach to integrating peer support, where the responsibilities for adopting new ways of working fall to all staff, not just the peer support workers themselves. Key Practitioner Message: ? Practitioners placed high value on the peer support workers on their teams due to their unique personalised engagement with clients; ? The roles of peer support workers were poorly understood by team members; ? Organisational integration of peer support principles could improve the way all staff engage with clients to reflect a recovery orientation.     

Social workers' emotional labour with families in poverty: Neoliberal fatigue?

This study examines the emotional labour of social workers serving families living in poverty. Based on in‐depth interviews and focus groups, the study concentrates on frontline social workers' emotions when faced with increasing levels of poverty, growing caseloads, and neoliberal social policies in Israel. Findings highlight 3 interrelated aspects of the emotional labour of social workers involved with impoverished families: (a) the emotional flooding social workers experience in their professional routines, (b) the various practices of emotional labour they use to cope with the emotional backlash of their encounters with these families including emotional numbness, emotional Othering, and emotional splitting, and (c) confirmation of the harmful influence of institutional policies on their emotional well‐being and ability to respond effectively to the increasing demands of their clients. Based on Hochschild's theory of emotional labour, we maintain that social workers' emotions should be studied in the context of a specific social, institutional, and political background.     

Ethical Assessment of the Use of Influence in Adult Protective Services

The role of influence in social work practice has been generally understated despite its importance to the course and outcome of the clinical process. This paper examines the influence strategies used by adult protective service workers with clients who refuse the services that the workers think the clients need for their own protection. It then discusses the moral justifications provided by the workers for using influence to overcome their clients' reluctance to comply with their recommendations. Finally it suggests questions to guide an ethical assessment of the use of influence in practice.     

The Role of Housing Managers in the Implementation of Community Care

This article will outline the response of housing management to the implementation of community care policy in the North East. It will locate housing's role within the broader development of community care policy, and briefly review the reasons for housing's relatively late arrival as a key partner, alongside social services and health, in the planning and delivery of services. Using information gathered from interviews with housing professionals, part-time housing students, voluntary organizations, and workers within health and social services, it outlines and evaluates five main factors which appear to be affecting the successful integration of housing management into the process of planning and delivering community care services in the North East.     

The normalisation of income management in Australia: analysis of the parliamentary debates of 2007 and 2009–10

Initially introduced as part of Australia's Northern Territory Intervention in 2007, Income Management (IM) explicitly targeted inhabitants of remote NT Indigenous communities. IM is a form of welfare conditionality that involves compulsorily ‘quarantining’ at least half of individuals' social security income. It has been heavily criticised for being racist, discriminatory, and a violation of individual rights. The introduction of New Income Management (NIM) in 2010 extended IM beyond Indigenous communities and introduced a new set of eligibility criteria that shifted the focus of IM from Indigenous people to working age recipients of social security income. This in depth study of the early parliamentary debates on the compulsory IM programs traces the patterns of political discourse that led to IM coming to be seen by many policy makers as a normal and legitimate technique within Australian social policy. Situating the IM programs within neoliberal concerns about welfare dependency and active citizenship, this article argues that the introduction of NIM heralded a shift from a conception of IM as part of a focused social experiment targeted at remote Indigenous communities to a potentially mainstream social policy option.     

Compulsory Income Management in the Northern Territory – evaluating its impact

Australia has been experimenting with constraining the ways in which welfare recipients can spend their income support payments, limiting their ability to access cash and purchase some products. The policy objectives include to reduce spending on alcohol, gambling, pornography and tobacco in favour of meeting ‘basic’ family needs, especially for children, to limit the scope for financial harassment, encourage pro‐social behaviours, and build financial capabilities. In the logic of the programs these outcomes are expected to be manifest at the individual, family and community levels. The policy has primarily impacted on Indigenous Australians as a result of its geographic targeting, although a recent report has recommended a more stringent version of the program be introduced universally to all welfare recipients other than the aged. The largest of these experiments is ‘New Income Management’ in the Northern Territory, which has had more than 35,000 participants since its introduction in 2010. This article reports on the key findings of the major independent evaluation of New Income Management commissioned by the Australian Government.     

Tea and Sympathy or Teetering on Social Work? An Investigation of the Blurring of the Boundaries Between Voluntary and Professional Care

As the voluntary sector, particularly the use of volunteers, has been promoted and given greater importance and responsibility by the government, and statutory personal social services have been attacked, the boundaries between voluntary and professional care have become blurred. This article investigates this phenomenon using data from a study of a Home-Start scheme, which employs two part-time professional workers to organize a pool of volunteers. It looks at the reality of the provision of voluntary care from the perspective of the volunteers, the organizers of the scheme, and those for whom they provide a service. The gender perspective is considered as a crucial aspect in the “blurring of the boundaries”. It is argued that the new rhetoric of the flexibility and adaptability of welfare provided by the voluntary sector hides the increasing use of women volunteers, to offer sophisticated and intensive care. This creates a dilemma. In some cases, the women volunteers and their organizers feel that the essential nature of the care and the responsibility they are expected to take on are inappropriate and should be fulfilled by professional workers. On the other hand, the clients feel that its voluntary nature is an essential part of this care and that it could not be provided by paid statutory workers.     

Education for the Group Worker's Reality: The Special Qualities and World View of Those Drawn to Work with Groups

SUMMARY

Within the social work profession, one's world view, one's beliefs and values based on one's experiences, strongly influences one's practice and comfort with groups. This paper will examine some of the different ways of viewing the world held by practitioners and students in relation to the likelihood that they will be able to work effectively with groups. Such examination, and the identification of the differences among social workers that results from it has implications for both teaching and supervision in social work. These implications will be discussed and specific principles and techniques for teaching social workers, in education and in supervision, based on their world views will be described. This paper aims to enrich education for group work so that the community of social group work practitioners can grow and continue to thrive.     

Social workers' perceptions of children's right to participation

Recent years have witnessed a growing worldwide recognition for the need to incorporate children's right to participate into the child welfare system. Yet studies show that most children in the welfare system do not feel that they are listened to or that their opinions are taken into account. This paper presents findings from a study conducted among 151 Israeli social workers, examining their perceptions on children's participation. The study explored to what extent they implement this principle in their everyday practice and whether there is a relationship between their perceptions and their actions. The findings revealed that social workers tend to endorse a protective position with regard to children's participation and that they only partially implement children's right to participation in their daily practice.     

Activation,Public Employment Services and their Clients: The Role of Social Class in a Continental Welfare State

This article fills a gap in the existing literature by investigating how public employment service (PES) staff actually deal with their clients under a continental regime of activation. The results reported here are based on interviews both with PES staff and their unemployed clients in Germany. We argue that due to its Bismarckian origins as an insurance‐based system of ‘unemployment protection’, Germany's system of unemployment compensation is attractive not only for the marginalized, but also for core workers. As a result, PES staff deal with clients from very heterogeneous class backgrounds. We demonstrate that social class is a significant factor in client outcomes, and that earlier research has perhaps overemphasized the role of frontline staff as ‘street‐level bureaucrats’. While staff do have considerable power, the result of the encounters between the administration and clients also depends on the capabilities of the clients, which, in turn, are strongly related to social class.     

Open Records: The Client's Right to Partnership

Summary Many Social Services Departments have opened their files totheir clients or intend to do so. This reflects the incomingtide of concern about citizens' rights and client participation,but what effect might the opening of records have on the practiceof social work? The paper summarizes the findings of a small scale study inwhich a team of social workers opened their case recording toa selected number of clients. The workers’ and clients‘views of this process are described, along with the implicationsfor practice. The study suggests that a focus on shared recordingcan begin to alter the kind of work done by the social worker,helping to promote a partnership between the worker and theclient. Finally, the paper argues that a policy of client access enforcedonly as a right is prone to sabotage or a fall into disuse.A seven point training programme is outlined in order to helpsocial workers use Open Records as an opportunity to promotea partnership in their work with clients.     

Matching Practice Skills with Client Problems

Abstract

Despite the increasing pressure to measure social work practice skills and relate those activities to client outcomes and treatment costs, relatively little social work research has been devoted to the development of social work process instruments. The recent development of the Practice Skills Inventory has provided practitioners with a useful tool for measuring the frequency with which practitioners employ specific categories of common social work intervention skills. However, it is important to demonstrate that social workers employ these practice skills differentially depending on clients' presenting problems. The current study of 281 experienced MSW practitioners demonstrates that they, indeed, emphasize supportive, therapeutic, case management and insight facilitation skills differentially depending on the problems experienced by their clients. Implications for practice and evaluation research are addressed.     

Productive engagement across the life course: paid work and beyond

An uncertain economic outlook and the certitude of an ageing population highlight the importance of productive activity across all age groups for Australia's future. This paper reviews Australian and international research on productive ageing, which has typically focused on older age groups and specific activities, and presents national findings from Wave 10 (2010) of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey on productive activities across the life course. Both paid, tax‐generating and unpaid, voluntary activities are examined, including paid work, volunteering, caregiving, childcare, and domestic work. The kinds of productive activity people engaged in varied across age groups for men and women, highlighting the potential competition between paid work and other activities, and the importance of health and education for engagement across all ages. While the Government has begun leading actions to enhance and recognise these contributions that bring economic and social benefits both to the individual and the broader community, our research reinforces the value of investment in human capital for productive engagement across the lifespan inclusive of early, middle and later life.     

Diversity and Identity in the Non-profit Sector: Lessons from LGBT Organizing in Toronto

The objective of this paper is to explore the ways in which diversity is taken into account in the conceptualization, definition and role of the voluntary sector as well as policy debates around the recasting of relations between the state and the voluntary sectors. The paper is based on a study of voluntary sector organizing among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) citizens in the city of Toronto. It presents an overview of LGBT voluntary sector organizing in the city, demonstrating the rich network of non‐profit organizations that serve the LGBT community in the city of Toronto, Canada's largest city. The paper argues that the dominant cross‐national and cross‐time definitions of the voluntary sector do not account for some of the specific features of LGBT organizing and result in the marginalization of such organizing from the very concept of the voluntary sector. The paper discusses the implications of this mapping for policy discussions of the state–voluntary sector relationship. Drawing on the Canadian experience of government consultation with voluntary sector organizations, the paper demonstrates that such initiatives define certain forms of diversity in voluntary sector organizing out of the policy‐making process. Traditional policy‐making around voluntary sector issues is organized in ways that exclude urban and local identity‐based organizing.     

Social workers' perspectives on parental engagement when children are at risk in Romanian society

This paper presents the findings of a study that looked at social workers' perspectives on parental engagement in making the difficult choice of either taking the child into care or keeping the family together. The paper first explores the specific context of children at risk in Romanian society and explains that in this middle‐income nation there is an absence of evidence‐based risk assessment tools, which prompts social workers to use their own ‘common sense’ risk assessment indicators. The findings of this small‐scale, non‐representative study on several public non‐voluntary child protection services in Romania suggest that social workers' perceptions of specific dimensions of parental engagement in non‐voluntary child protection may influence service delivery decisions and outcomes.     

Problems and Concerns of Welfare Paraprofessionals Working with Refugees

Summary In the present study of job motivation and the special problemsand concerns of 70 German community service workers it was foundthat they saw in their work an opportunity to apply their ownspecial talents, but that they were experiencing increasingdisillusionment and a sense of being manipulated and used bytheir clients. The participants found the opportunity to discussthese issues very helpful and such topics should not be neglectedin initial or in-service education.     

Asylum, children's rights and social work

Although it is only a minority of displaced and persecuted people globally who seek refuge in ‘Western’ countries, they meet an increasingly hostile reception. This paper focuses on the situation facing children seeking asylum with or without their families in Britain and Australia, and the implications for children's rights and for social work. The policy background and its racist foundations in both countries are outlined. Despite geopolitical differences, there are unnerving parallels. Legislative changes and policy complexity signal increasingly punitive attitudes towards asylum seekers. The situation of children and families in the community is discussed in terms of the exclusion of asylum seekers from basic rights, and specific issues for separated children. Even more damaging is the incarceration of children and families in detention centres, and the emerging research is explored. In both countries there is widespread flouting of children's rights, and children also feature as pawns in ideological contests. However, they also act autonomously and illustrate an inclusive model of citizenship. The role of social workers in the statutory and voluntary sectors is considered, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges for social work of avoiding collusion with repressive policies and actively promoting human rights.