Competency of a Social Worker as a Community Worker - Essay Example

In this task we deliberate, from our viewpoints as a social worker or care manager and as a community worker in a collaborative community mental health group, on our duty and work with individuals who have critical and lifelong care needs. I will provide a story of a late afternoon psychotherapy group of a client which we got involved, as a case in point. We appreciate current initiatives to aim at vulnerable populations and guarantee that they receive organized quality community care. Simultaneously, we recognize that in any process of care there are risks which can weaken the core goals that they pursue to realize. We claim, and do so using the model of the psychotherapy team, that our task is not to differentiate but to assimilate. Psychiatric services and involvements must be designed with this in consideration. If not, in the deviation from an asylum-based mechanism towards a community-based framework, we formulate systems that lead to once again a segregation between individuals with mental problems and the broader community. We make use of the psychotherapy team as one model of a service that was provided as portion of a package accessible to clients, and of how a team can be representative for assimilation and relationship, rather than segregation, when it turns out to be a site where clients with various requirements and demands and capabilities interact with each other, and in which the care manager is enthusiastically involved in continuing treatment. I. Our Definition of Community Care The driving force of this essay is the objective to develop concepts such as community care. These are sort of concepts to which all of us connect some definition or meaning, with little knowledge as to whether this definition or purpose is collective in nature. We can turn out to be persuasive in our application of them as a means of preventing the burdensome difficulties experienced by our clients, and as well for us, in making the concepts a certainty. Community Current UK legislation, specifically the National Health Service and Community Care Act and associated Department of Health, presents a legislative paradigm for the transition in psychiatry towards individuals with mental problems obtaining their care in their own community. Intrinsic in this action is the postulation that there is a unit as community (Corcoran, 2006, 83). It is not one voluntarily accessible, nevertheless, for our clients to make use of. In an exceptionally actual sense, there is no such entity as community for many of them. It has to be fashioned both within and outside. Several are indifferent to themselves and to their fellow beings, and through mental problems they become discriminated and increasingly secluded. Hospitals offer a traditional community recognized with a concrete physical existence. With no such physical manifestation, the concept of community turns out to be more complicated (Hall, 2003). Care Care is not something that vulnerable individuals can readily receive. Much frequently, those with mental problems and illnesses have had extremely unsatisfactory experiences of care, and their inner dimensions are troubled with assaulting and refusing objects as an outcome of their previous experiences of unsatisfactory care. Clients can feel abandoned and ignored and social workers can harbour any feeling but caring: to a certain extent, they can feel detestable and attacking back. The rule of care at a reachable manner, care management, can function as a defence mechanism, to enlarge the emotional gap between social worker and client (Nash, 2005). We would assert that the satisfactory care for what is an exceptionally uneven and secluded group of individuals can be provided by practitioners only if they possess a comprehensive knowledge of the mechanisms of mental disorder, and carry over a reflective and systematic framework of the work. Based on our experience, the impact on social workers of concentrating solely on individuals with critical and continuing mental problem is decisively unfavourable to clients. Several of those aimed at as being primary concern are hesitant participants in care, which is a consideration frequently neglected in notions of a client-guided approach to care. A sizeable minority accessed the care system thru enforced admission and has unpleasant difficulties in engaging, frequently assaulting the care or care managers, turning down interaction and relationship. When these are the only individuals aimed at, the impact can be desensitizing for social workers forming a caring team that is unfeeling, rather than animate and receptive to the concerns and needs that this task demands. It can generate a defensive attitude that results in to mediocre practice and care. The risk of present trends is that knowledgeable and experienced social workers with proficiency in several fields abandon the public arena, leaving behind a disheartened and self-protective service. II. The History of the Team We are working with several clients whose disorders are, at first observation, dilemmas in communication, in relationship and in fitting in. We work in a group which intends to give clients with a feeling of community. We carry this out through making use of a local community centre, supervising primarily activity-based teams there, and through our set of connections and the providing of quality care. We would maintain that the group as well accomplishes this in every attribute of its therapeutic involvements, not least through the psychiatric therapy team. The team is a sluggish, open group; specifically, new members are allowed to join the team throughout its existence, and a number of members leave, yet the team is provided time to be ready for these adjustments and necessary consideration is granted by the team coordinator as to when the team is prepared for them. Work for us is initiated with participating in a weekly management group at an Institute. That work was very important to the ensuing existence of the group, guiding us to prepare and deliberate on the ongoing process. We concurred to communicate with prospective members at least three times prior to their membership in the group, to evaluate and to organize them for the team. We place announcements and advertisements for the team in sites that our clients often visit, such as general practitioner surgeries and drop-in centres. We appraised twenty people with a wide array of need, from those demanding care management, or those suffering from serious and/or continuing mental disorder, to others with not too serious disorders. Among these twenty, eleven were not given places, either on the basis of their own preferences or for the reason that we felt the team did not sufficiently address their needs, or for the reason that the requirements of the group in general contra-specified their participation. Of the initial nine individuals who participated, three dropped out prematurely than we suggested: we were aware that there is risk of individuals departing in flight, in so doing replicating traditional routines in their lives. Nevertheless, majority of the group members, involving those who left, have noticed visible changes in their activities and behaviour. At the time of writing this essay, the membership involves clients who have persistent and enduring mental disorders and eligible for care administration under the requirement standards of our local authority; others with serious and enduring personality disorders such as psychotics, or depressive indications; and one with a number of personality disorders who experiences unconstructive anxiety. III. The Importance of Collaborative Social Work Working with priority or high-risk clients, who exhibit negative desires onto the group and onto the coordinators, requires a capability to grant control or containment while our own counter-transmissions are extremely difficult to tolerate. Their desires are to turn down and discharge rather than remain and deliberate. We, as coordinators, were frequently recognized originally as the only individuals in the team able to control such feelings in order to deliberate on them. Our duty has been to have faith in the team to accomplish that task, to permit the team members to design for each other means of presenting such a deliberating capability. We have assured that individuals in the group come with various life histories and varying experiences of psychotherapy services: some enduring present predicaments, prompting them to start facing weak attributes of themselves. Furthermore, some are evidently willing to work, and understand the process enthusiastically, whereas others exhibit their ambivalence more noticeably. Majority are defended and perplexed. By having faith that the group will carry out the task, we as coordinators facilitate relationships to be established within the team at the own tempo of individual members. For some of the members of the team, one of the most challenging things to confront has been that predicaments that have been formerly constantly defined in relation to illness can be recognized in other manners that do not reject the truth of illness, but nevertheless grant them more control, which is quite a worrisome possibility. They accomplish through establishing relationships with other members of the team. A number of those other members have similar dilemmas in affiliations and in having power over their lives, but do not have similar disorder paradigm on which to resort into, and, furthermore, persevere on regularizing several of the experiences of their ailing colleagues. One consequence can be that team members who formerly elaborated all their predicaments in relation to mental disorders are compelled to revisit how they perceive themselves. If the group were made up of entirely of those satisfying care management standards, it would serve its role in an exceptionally different manner, the learning and modelling would be placed more on the shoulders of the coordinators rather than on the whole team. The primary, or only, deliberative function would be ours, and this would serve against the group dynamics of learning. It would not offer the same prospect to the more problematic members of recognition and recuperating through the ideas of others less damaged and less susceptible to mental or personality disorder. It would be more complicated to transfer to a status where health would be perceived as situated not merely in the coordinators but in the group entirely. What should be evident to the team members is our own faith and trust for one another as colleagues, enhanced through the custody that we obtain. Good pairing, bad pairing and inability to pair at all have been matters for every team member. IV. Conclusions Psychotherapy is frequently perceived as a costly alternative; setting aside the comparative economy of teamwork as contrary to individual, we would want to take into account the impact of working in this manner on other sectors of community care such as hospitalization. The primary driving force of our claim has been that any discourse of the notions of ‘community care’ should assume a more incorporated and assimilating framework. We encourage the inevitability of improved flexibility in drawing on the strengths and capabilities of social workers, aiming at the more susceptible but not secluding other helpless clients. We desire to evade a framework that gives only high priority to those critical and continuing mentally ill, exempting the less problematic and possibly disapprovingly, recognized as the anxious well. Current transitions concern us since they further segregate the most severely ill from their tangible community, and from that sense of belongingness that is extremely evasive for them. In the team, we guaranteed that the standard for membership embraced a broad range of need. We have maintained that our task is to collaborate with our clients toward assimilation and connections with the outer community. But the two aspects are interrelated. This meets the criteria of community care. It is all about the care that links and assimilates rather than seclusions. It is not about displacing one structure, a health centre which responds to clients’ feeling of isolation through detaching them even more from the rest of the community, with another which leaves individuals within a worrisome alleged community and bolsters their sense of disconnectedness and perplexity. We assume that, rather than formulating more rules and processes, the focus has to change in the current period towards control, advocacy and preparation for psychotherapeutic work. Through improving opportunities for personnel development, and fashioning an environment that promotes the progress of a range of approaches, we can dispute and cheer up, rather than desensitize, both social workers and clients. Sympathetic care is indeed quality care. Evaluating the outcome of that community care, rather than merely gathering numerical data, is a valuable assessment of that quality. Assessing quality of care should consider the degree to which it indisputably allows assimilation and the improvement in our clients of that intangible notion of community. References Burke, P. (2007). Social Work and Disadvantage: Addressing the Roots of Stigma through Association. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley. Bytheway, B. et al. (2002). Understanding Care, Welfare and Community: A Reader. 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