Healthcare and social work: no Mills and Boon please

Healthcare remains a crucial location for social work, as we see from this comprehensive new Portuguese book on social work in healthcare, published by Pactor in Lisbon and edited by Maria Irene de Carvalho. (And in which I have a chapter on palliative and end-of-life care.) There's also a chapter on social work and healthcare in Brazil, where a slightly different kind of Portuguese is spoken, but there's a lot of overlap.

Link to the publisher's website.

But healthcare is also a big anxiety for social workers, because they compare themselves with healthcare professionals and feel that social work does not get the same degree of recognition across the world.

There are three reasons for this: the class status of doctors, the sentiment attached to the caring role of nurses (and perhaps to some other ancillary healthcare professions) and the bureaucratic role of social workers in many of the European welfare states. Doctors are high-paid, upper-middle-class professionals with a lot of control of their profession and wide discretion in their work. But we all know that does not leave them free from criticism and political attack in our low-deference world. And do we want the kind of public regard that comes from the gendered view of nurses as 'idealised carer-servant-wives' instead of a full appreciation of the complex professional roles that nurses undertake? But we do have the problem that the public sees social workers in many countries as part of the government bureaucracy and knows about our official roles or child protection rather than our caring roles. It's the same limited perception of social work as the Mills and Boon view of nursing and medicine. At least we don't have people writing social work romances - or do we?

(Glossary: Mills and Boon are a large UK publisher of formula romantic novels, with a long line in handsome rich doctors and beauteous caring nurses falling in love and living happily ever after)

Local autonomy: what does it mean for social services?

The last of these posts that contain my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

An interesting question is raised for Britain about the social services legislation enacted by autonomous regions in Spain. If we want to devolve governments anywhere, as we are doing in the UK, what are the consequences of having diverging social care systems? A lot of countries, including the US and many European countries, have experience of this. 

In Britain people are worried about post-code lotteries, in which people in one area get better services because of the political choices in healthcare. They haven’t started to be concerned so much about social care, but perhaps they should be in view of the growing number of older people and the focus on cutting benefits and social services by our government (another example of putting the consequences of inadequate theories of economics onto the poor). You can't have real devolution without having differences in the services available in different places, and we need to work out this tension in every country's social care system.

Young people need new kinds of work, not just education to boost the present economic system

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

This article also notes the ‘invisibility’ of young people’s needs in the Spanish welfare state: this must be a big issue for many European countries when there are high rates of youth unemployment. When I worked on unemployment projects in the last financial crisis of the 1980s, there was a real concern for young people’s life chances, even if the projects were a bit self-serving for the organisations providing them.

But do we really think that just having some work experience or improving people’s education is enough. I think we need to develop new kinds of work that allow young people to make a contribution to their society, not just improve their education to fit our current economic models. After all, young people’s education has been strongly targeted in developing countries on the assumption this will strengthen those countries’ economies, but the result is that many African countries have a lot of highly educated unemployed young people. Education doesn’t develop economies without government and entrepreneurs developing activities in the economy that can actually employ young people.

Evaluating social services to death: more participation less evaluation

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

One of these articles demands social work academic thinking to be more strongly evidence-based but another raises an interesting question: is the constant demand for programme evaluation an imposition on people who are running and receiving services? Many service users complain or being researched to death, when what they really want is participation in planning and running services. This might be much more effective in improving services than producing yet another lot of service evaluation reports that everyone reads and does little about.

Don't borrow the latest buzz-policy: fit policy development to local culture and needs

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

Some issues are experienced across the world, but are policy and service developments too ready to cull the answers from what's going on alsewhere rather than developing something that relates to their own culture and situation.

One article focuses on how social work methods are evolving to enable service users to be more participative, a policy that is exerting an unthinking tyranny across the world, but is this really the most important issue in practice development? Another is about case management to improve health and social care integration, but should how we work on the issues that individuals face be the vehicle for coordinating different professional aspirations and ideologies? Every country and culture should think about what fits its needs, not just adopt the current buzz-policy from somewhere else.

We need a new economics that does not blame the poor, 'anticrisis' jokes are not enough

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

Economic crisis always has social impacts, in which economics blames the poor and individual failure rather than raising questions about the social impacts of economics. I recently took part in a Facebook debate about this issue, raised by a colleague in Portugal, also facing social effects of an economic crisis that has social consequences.  

Link to the Facebook comments.

One article has data on the effects of the Spanish economic crisis in family poverty. But should we really see this as a Spanish problem, or as a European responsibility, since the crisis is European? Another article comments on the need to develop a community social work, since the ‘economic crisis’ encourages a neo-Darwinism individualism in policy. We ned a new economics that does not lay the blame and the consequences of economic change on our poor and marginalised communities.

Visiting Spain recently...

I saw for sale labelled 'Anticrisis'...

...money boxes picturing Euros...

...and tissues in Euro form, too.