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)