Responses of the social work profession to unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland

The Republic of Ireland is rapidly developing immigration legislation and policies to respond to its relatively new status as a destination for asylum seekers and refugees within the European Union. New political definitions of asylum seekers and refugees are being constructed in a country with its own history of mass emigration. At the same time, the economic growth that is making Ireland a more attractive destination for asylum seekers and refugees has also fuelled an unprecedented expansion in the employment of social workers. Specialized services are now being developed for unaccompanied children who are seeking asylum. This expansion in the number of social workers and growth in service provision has led to little professional debate about the role of social workers with asylum seekers and refugees. This paper examines the questions raised by the provision of social work services to these children and considers the wider implications for the development of the social work profession and social work practices in Ireland.     

Family Caregivers for Seniors in Rural Areas

In this article, the demographic characteristics of family caregivers for seniors in rural communities are assessed to examine whether their circumstances could facilitate or impede their well-being. Services available in rural communities for family members providing ongoing care to frail seniors is examined, particularly those that provide health and social services. How families access these services and whether there are specific barriers in service provision are analyzed based on current social work practice and the research literature. Trends for future services are identified as well as whether these trends support new roles for social workers in rural settings.     

Variation in part‐time job quality within the nonprofit human service sector

This article extends the growing literature on the quality of part‐time employment to the domain of nonprofit human services, specifically grassroots organizations in which paid work is itself a relatively new reality. It addresses three central questions: How do part‐time and full‐time workers differ in their personal and household characteristics? How do part‐time jobs differ in access to employment benefits from their full‐time counterparts; and finally, How does benefits access vary among part‐time job titles? These lines of inquiry are examined using data from the populations of nonprofit domestic violence programs and their employees in a large midwestern metropolitan area. Analyses of worker‐level data reveal that part‐time workers in these settings disproportionately live with children, are in committed relationships, and report a strong preference for employment that facilitates work‐life balance; they are also less likely to be primary household wage earners. Analyses at the level of jobs suggest that employment benefits extended to part‐time jobs are minimal compared to their full‐time equivalents, but there are also striking variations among different part‐time titles. The results offer insights into the nature of part‐time work in these nonprofit human service settings and potential challenges for effective management.     

Emergency department social work in the UK and Sweden: evaluation by older frequent emergency department attenders Kuratorsarbete på akutmottagning i förenade kungadömet Storbritannien och Sverige: en utvärdering utifrån brukarperspektivet hos äldre mångbesökare på akutmottagningen

Social work based in hospital emergency departments (EDs) in Sweden and the UK reflects a wider European social/health care policy trend. A key focus is on diverting older frequent ED attenders from ‘inappropriate’ hospital re-attendance or emergency admission, because of social care problems. However, previously there has been no evaluation of the significance of ED social work for health and well-being, from the standpoint of older frequent ED attenders themselves. In a preliminary way, our paper provides this through drawing on a small scale Swedish/UK study. Its comparative account of service user feedback underscores the importance of ED social work as a facet of European social work. It indicates that ED social work contributes to the quality of care within emergency departments, acts as a key access point to social services, and can promote both short and longer-term health. At the same time, some serious shortcomings emerge. These include under-developed referral systems, and limitations to community based services following ED social work assessment, which reflect the under-resourcing of social care provision in both countries. Moreover, service users’ experience in both Sweden and the UK reveals the risk of ED social work with older frequent ED attenders being used as a substitute for follow-up medical/nursing care when that is also required.     

The geriatric social worker and his self-awareness

Abstract

Hospice and palliative care services have become an established part of Australian health care in the last decade. Multi-disciplinary teams are usually a feature of such services and social workers are common members of such teams. Yet the exact extent of their use and role in these programs has not been investigated previously. The author conducted a survey of 53 social workers working in such programs and at the same time, another questionnaire was also sent to service directors in all 134 Australian programs about their utilisation and perception of social workers. This article reports the results of both surveys. The results show that a third of the programs employed social workers, but the social workers themselves reported a number of difficulties: nurses are often the dominant occupational group and role-blurring amongst team members is common. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the social work profession.     

Survival and Abuse: What We Can Learn From It

This article is about a journey involving survival, abuse and learning. It is written by two people who have considerable experience of being involved with mental health services; both are currently making an active contribution to social work education. It describes the way in which, in situations of survival and abuse, service users can use their experience and knowledge to learn how to support and advocate for each other. It suggests that the relationships that are built between service users as a result of these experiences can be used to address some of the gaps in service provision. At the same time these relationships can provide mutual learning which can be used to improve the education and training of social workers and other professionals.     

Forging an Identity as a Newly Qualified Worker in the Non-government Community Services Sector

Forging a professional identity is commonly assumed to be a key objective for new graduates transitioning to work. However, the extant literature on professional identity development gives minimal consideration to the role of contemporary work conditions such as increased contract-based employment and occupational instability in carving out a work identity. These workforce trends are particularly pronounced in the non-government community services sector, where worker mobility is high and workers often occupy roles that are not profession-specific. In light of these trends, this article seeks to broaden existing understandings of professional identity development. Focus groups were conducted with 24 newly qualified workers with degree-level qualifications in social work and the human services employed in the community services sector in Queensland. The findings suggest that these workers held a variety of allegiances, which were not necessarily aligned with a profession but instead shaped by the interplay of personal, professional, and organisational factors.     

Managing Risk in Community Care of Older People: Perspectives from the Frontline

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, Australian governments have focused on expanding community and home-based services for older people. This has led to increased levels of dependency, vulnerability, and complexity to be managed in the community. Consequently, aged care services have had to develop mechanisms for regulating and managing these increased risks, and risk management has become more central to the practices of professional workers in this field. This paper reports on some findings from a large-scale study that explores the way risk management policies have been translated into practice by community-based services in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on interviews with 18 frontline and management professionals employed in community aged care, we found that these workers were wrestling with a diverse and new range of institutional risks beyond those encountered in the actual delivery of frontline care. We found that these workers experienced “risk” in four different contexts, which often created demands for contradictory or conflicting responses. Here we examine these “contexts of risk practice”: professional workers' relationships with their clients, relationships with other service providers, the unregulated nature of the home as a work environment, and community expectations about the management of risk. Despite tensions that frequently arose, workers expressed strong professional commitments to their clients and were motivated to find positive resolutions amid competing interests. We conclude that tensions experienced by workers were embedded in the structural dimensions of institutional relationships and the systematic absence of shared understandings of “acceptable” risks in the community care of older people, rather than in the failure of professional agency.     

Gendered,Invisible Work in Non‐profit Social Service Organizations: Implications for Worker Health and Safety

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.     

The key role of social workers in promoting the well‐being of children in state care — a neglected dimension in reforming policies

Increasingly, policy measures are emerging at national or agency level in different countries to improve the lot of children in state care. Most of these rely heavily on social workers for their implementation. Yet the capacity of social workers to carry out such an ever increasing range of complex tasks seems never to be properly recognised as an issue. This paper argues, from an international perspective, that the continuing central role of social work in the lives of children in care merits much more emphasis in policy and service delivery. The nature of the increasing demands on social workers in this area of work are explored. Possible strategies to help build the capacity of social workers to respond to the needs of children in state care in the new millennium are discussed. Such capacity building necessitates government and agency initiatives to ensure realistic staffing levels, renewed training, and adequate support for social work services to children in state care. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

"WE DON'T PAY FOR BUS TICKETS, BUT WE CAN HELP YOU FIND WORK":

Guided by the concept of social problems work and the micropolitics of trouble perspective, we examine the discursive strategies used by social workers to conduct intake interviews with homeless clients. Trouble was a pervasive feature of these encounters: clients often requested services that diverged from the service preferences expressed by social workers. Social workers used elicitation strategies to solicit information about clients' biographies and their service needs and seminarrative raps to construct service plans with clients. Conceptualized as rhetorical devices, these strategies appear to have managed trouble in ways that articulated closely with material and nonmaterial aspects of the organizational context. We illustrate how these strategies articulated with an agency preference for consensus-style service planning and a focus on clients' recent biographies and immediate problems. Further, we show how these strategies managed the provision of scarce resources in ways that focused on remedies that could be tied to long-term client stability. We conclude by offering the outlines of a general model of the micropolitics of trouble in human service encounters.     

Technology and School Social Work Services: Introducing Technology in an Alternative School

SUMMARY

The public school system, one of the largest human service institutions in our nation, is continuously engaged in a struggle to balance the needs of a growing and diverse population with continuing threats of budget cuts. Under these conditions, it becomes even more critical that school social workers understand and appreciate the role of technology in delivering and evaluating services. To assess the effectiveness of school social work services, evaluation will have to be planned for, and systems of data collection and processing will have to be conducted on an ongoing basis.

This paper outlines the process whereby school social workers in a local school district proceeded to introduce technology into their service delivery regimen. Secondly, the paper shows how such technology was, and may be, used to evaluate the services provided by school social workers in an alternative school.     

‘If I Had a Family,There Is No Way That I Could Afford to Work Here’: Juggling Paid and Unpaid Care Work in Social Services

Drawing on three case studies in each of Australia, New Zealand and Scotland, this article explores how care workers employed in the social services sector negotiate their unpaid care responsibilities in the context of lean work organization and low pay. For younger workers, the unrelenting demands of service provision and low pay made any long‐term commitment to working in social services unrealistic, while many female workers experienced significant stress as they bent their unpaid care responsibilities to the demands of their paid work. However, male workers, less likely to have primary caring responsibilities, appeared less troubled by the prioritizing of paid over unpaid care work and less likely to self‐exploit for the job. At the same time, there is a widespread acceptance across different national and organizational contexts that the work/family juggle is a personal responsibility rather than a structural problem caused by the demands of underfunded and overstretched organizations.     

The 193 call center, a meaningful public service!

This article is the first part of an on-going ergonomic work analysis with the emergency services call center set up by the Fire Department of the Military Police of S?o Paulo. The final objective of the research is to identify the prescribed task, the real work executed and strategies used by workers to meet the demands of the job. Starting by identifying the tasks and activities developed, this article analyzes the work of the emergency services call center which is of vital importance to the organizational structure, since it is the start point for the process that results in fulfilling the corporation's mission.     

The Revitalization of Community Practice: Characteristics,Competencies, and Curricula for Community-Based Services

Abstract

A recent move toward community-based services on the part of direct service agencies presents a major opportunity for the revitalization of community practice. Driven by funding from major philanthropic foundations and also by recent changes in federal entitlement legislation, these efforts at system reform are designed to make services for vulnerable populations more effective, accessible, integrated, and comprehensive in the context of the local community. Although this service reorganization requires the type of methods typically found in community practice, direct service workers employed in these agencies usually have not been trained in community work. To begin to address this concern, this article uses a computerized word search to review the community practice and community organization literature. A working definition of “community-based” practice is developed. The extensive literature review yields six characteristics of community-based service delivery: (1) neighborhood-based and family-focused; (2) strengths- and empowerment-oriented; (3) cultural sensitivity and multi-cultural competency; (4) comprehensive services; (5) access to integrated services and supports; and (6) teamwork and leadership skills. The article reviews what scholars have recommended in each of these areas as a way of understanding the characteristics of community-based service delivery and the skills needed by direct practitioners working in community-based programs. The article summarizes innovative curricula and specific courses which demonstrate ways of teaching community skills to direct practice workers. Future work for community practice scholars and educators is recommended.     

Corporate Strategy and Gendered Professional Identities: Reorganization and the Struggle for Recognition and Positions

Will decentralization of responsibilities in services give women service workers at the lower levels of the organization better and more ‘professional’ jobs and a recognition of their importance in the organization? This article looks at the valuation of so‐called women's skills in services in reorganization processes involving dehierarchization and decentralization of responsibilities. Through four cases of reorganized private and public services in Norway it is shown that more focus on customers and decentralization of responsibilities for the services may lead to recognition of gendered skills and an improved position for women service workers at the lowest levels of the organization. When the tasks of the workers are closely linked to the core function of the organization and not dominated by the organization's ‘dirty work’, the women at the lowest levels may obtain a more ‘professional’ work role and their work be recognized as important for the organization.     

New Technology in Home Help Services — A Tool for Support or an Instrument of Subordination?

The implementation of information and communication technologies (ICT) is in line with a general transformation of the work of home help services in Sweden. One strong motivation behind the introduction of new technology was to change the ways of working towards greater efficiency in order to reduce costs and at the same time raise the value of care‐giving work. This article discusses the introduction of ICT in home help services as a part of the increasing rationalization of care‐giving work and its consequences for the workers. The results of an ethnographic study of the introduction of hand‐held computers in a working team in home help services in Sweden shows that the motives for the implementation of ICT run counter to the basic norms that are supposed to govern care‐giving work. The technology participates in reproducing the subordinate position of care‐giving work as well as that of the front‐line workers. The workers act according to personal decision‐making ability and show a form of limited resistance to the technology while, at the same time, taking part in their own subordination.     

Heavy physical work under time pressure: the garbage collection service--a case study

The increased generation of garbage has become a problem in large cities, with greater demand for collection services. The collector is subjected to high workload. This study describes the work in garbage collection service, highlighting the requirements of time, resulting in physical and psychosocial demands to collectors. Ergonomic Work Analysis (EWA) - a method focused on the study of work in real situations was used. Initially, technical visits, global observations and unstructured interviews with different subjects of a garbage collection company were conducted. The following step of the systematic observations was accompanied by interviews conducted during the execution of tasks, inquiring about the actions taken, and also interviews about the actions, but conducted after the development of the tasks, photographic records and audiovisual recordings, of workers from two garbage collection teams. Contradictions between the prescribed work and activities (actual work) were identified, as well as the variability present in this process, and strategies adopted by these workers to regulate the workload. It was concluded that the insufficiency of means and the organizational structure of management ensue a situation where the collection process is maintained at the expense of hyper-requesting these workers, both physically and psychosocially.     

Coordinating co-production in complex network settings

This article draws together the concepts of network management and co-production with complexity sciences. So far, these approaches have rarely been connected in research literature. We suggest that this conceptual framework offers new insights for analyzing the challenges of co-production in complex network settings in the local public services. The aim of the article is to find out how complex network structures meet the co-production process in the context of social and health care services. The empirical part of the article presents a Finnish case study of a multiprofessional service network producing social and health care services for youth. Here, the clients, in this case children and young people with a need for social services, often need multiple services from different service providers simultaneously. Our research findings suggest that the outcomes of the service process are not only dependent on the client's needs, but rather on organizational and professional interests. Our research gives new insights for the discussion on co-production; when it is applied as an intended policy to improve and deliver public services, the complexity of interaction among the street-level workers and the detached professional frameworks should be kept in mind.