American lack of international perspective

I occasionally put clips of things that I want to comment on and do not connect well with my blogs on my Clipboard site. In this case, it's an American educational website that claims to list '20 social workers of our time' and manages not to mention anyone outside the US. Not much of a perspective there.

Link to 'Clipboard' comment.

End-of-life care course for generalist social workers in Serbia

The European Association for Palliative Care reports on the development of a social work course on end-of-life in Serbia; it's a two-day course for non-specialised social workers. It's part of a bigger project to develop what I hope will be end-of-life care rather than palliative care in Serbia. There is currently one hospice.

My view is they should go for developing community health and social care that helps everyone who is approaching death, not just focusing on the medical preference for providing palliative care only for people that they have diagnosed as immediately dying. So it's good to see training for generalists, rather than specialists.

Link to the EAPC Report.

Alcohol use - start from what is good for humans, not the interests of alcohol sellers

One of those grey European documents on important topics, this time on a WHO European region plan for responsing to alcohol misuse and what European countries should be doing until 2020. A particular concern for 'heavy drinking' occasions, binge drinking to you and me. Lots on marketing etc. Although underage drinking appears in several of the sections, it's a pity there's no comprehensive plan directly aimed at preventing young people from getting into unhealthy alcohol use.Too much on managing the markets.

But we should never cut the economics off from the human. Plans should start from what is good for human beings; what is good for people selling alcohol should come a very long way behind.
Here's the link.

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.