Forming Partnerships and Working with Others - Essay Example

The needs of the service users of this world in today’s day and age are immense and intricately inter-woven with each other. Therefore, at the time when social workers come into contact with these service users and work with them on a normal day to day basis, the basic opportunities to work past the bounds of the simplistic and strive to achieve a service which would be appear to have no faults about it appears out of the horizon like a phoenix rising from the ashes as it provides a completely applicable workable solution to large plethora of needs of the users; which was our initial and most major concern. So, to summarize, we can see that partnership working is certainly one of the most applicable yet simplistic method of attaining best practices in any sphere of work in like. However, it is important to note that there is no room for failure in this aspect as the lives of people are so immensely intertwined and interconnected that any failure would see the entire system failing much like a house of cards falling if one is removed from the system. My personal placement is in one such place whereby the lives of many included in families and the careers of the parents in these families and they are intertwined, with our focus being to uncover the benefits of working in a group or a partnership with this specific phenomenon in our fore view. The benefits and possible detriments of working in collaboration with anyone will also be discussed in this paper, as the possible detriments of anything have the same importance and significance value attached to it as the benefits that are derived from it. [1] The structure of my job and the significance that I attach to it is certainly one which cannot be denied due to which confidentiality becomes such an important part of my inner working, especially when I am in deliberation with other personnel regarding some specific topics pertaining to my occupation. As with any other working environment, anonymity and discretion is certainly one of the most important facets of the place where I am doing my placement whereby it has been clearly specified in the literature, and clearly highlighted to us in a personal capacity that the dissemination or transfer of any type of service information regarding the users of the service without their proper knowledge and subsequent consent is completely with the exception being provided to simplistic time information; however, all of this has been put in place to prevent any damages to be incurred on the part of the users of the service; so to say that this is just a hybrid form of the attorney client privileges and/or the doctor patient confidentiality would not be much deviation from the truth, if it were to be no deviation at all. Therefore, it has been decided that for the purpose of this assignment and for the security of the information that has been made present to us, all names and places have been made anonymous and any similarities to any characters or events in real life, expect for cases whereby a proper reference is being quoted, is purely incidental. [2] Any organization is structured into a system with a hierarchy of kinds. In addition to this, every organization has their specific strengths and weaknesses, and working abilities due to which creating or forging partnership helps enhance and augment the problem solving techniques of these said organizations. Therefore, partnership forming allows organizations to synergize and pool their resources of strengths together and then tackle their relevant problems which provides a better outlook against these problems and allows for more complete solutions to be formulated which allows a more thorough solution, equipped to deal with any volatility in the conditions its external and internal conditions. However, this effort requires so much more then simplistic summation of resources for this is more than just a pooling of resources in the short run as this is a long term process for which litheness and candidness are as important factors as are robustness and scalability of the partnership formulation. Due to these reasons, every partnership could vary in size from being a single agency to a multiple agency as well as it varying in functionality i.e. similar agencies and inter-disciplinary agencies. Now, the work of Barrett provides great technical insight into the phenomenon of interdisciplinary practices whereby it is stated that inter-professional practices, as they have most commonly been come to referred as in the recent times, is now witnessed as the phenomenon where one works under a range of professions and disciplines with each providing their own tactical and technical insight which when pooled together synergize and initiate the propagation of proper timelines and treatment mechanisms and introduce the appropriate solutions that are a pre-requisite at any given point in time. [3] The social work profession has made partnership working as the recognized requirement for all its activities which certainly is a step in the right direction in the perception of many who believe that synergizing is the way forward as mere creation and required obliteration of assets is not an extremely workable plan of action in this day and age. The General Social Care Council (GSCC) states the importance of working in partnerships and team building that there is a need to pay due regard to the expertise of other professions and work in partnership with them. The National Occupational Standards of Social Work provide their opinion of the importance of the proper identification of critical information which can be transmitted or promulgated via other organizations in order for more affectivity and better service provisions for the end users. [4] Now, it is important that we retrace our steps back to 1970 in order to take a more holistic picture of the entire situation as it stands and understand, in simple terms, basically how and why I have been able to fill my current position in the agency. Now, at the said year, there was an adult training centre that was operational in the city which catered to the needs of adults who had some sort of learning disabilities; the range of the disability varying from soft to harsh, people with physical disabilities and people with mental health issues were also catered to. The centre mainly provided day care services for the people who had been admitted into this facility. In addition to this, the end service users were expected to perform some simple activities in lieu of a rather small remuneration as acclamation of their efforts. Now, the key thing to note in this whole scenario is that in 1985, the adult center was closed down on the basis that it was put in place to misuse the efforts of the workers present and severely exploitative measures were being implemented against these said workers. However, this created a huge furor amongst the parents and the children who belonged to the service end-user category who enjoyed their work experience on a whole and pined for it again and also the fact that these people wanted to keep themselves busy b doing something with their time and this was heir only option as normal employment in the society for this said group was extremely hard to come by at that point in time. Therefore, it becomes abundantly clear to everyone who was attached to the project and to the whole city in general that a mechanism had to be devised which would provide a solution out of the quagmire that these faced at that point in time. [5] This brought to life the agency whereby I am currently employed at, which came into existence in 1985; perhaps as a direct response to the furor that was caused at that point in time as I have just mentioned. Another indication that points us towards this same direction is the statistic that at the inception of this new agency, there were five people who used the services that were provided, however, now the eng users on the books of the agency total not in units but in figures of hundreds. This agency is being run by the local government and is completely under the legislation that is provided by the state with regards to institutions of this noir; with its vision and aim laying in the training and adults who are suffering from a disability. The process of supporting the end user in determining their specific area of interest and then setting up a series of tasks for them to complete without any assistance from your end but complete support behind the end-user to succeed, all in a bid to help people achieve their independence that will allow them to become more rounded individuals certainly encapsulates the Task Centered Approach, which is implemented across the board at this agency. This process is earmarked into smaller sections like job summarization and streamlining, development and subsequent guidance and finally matching and work testing all of which enables the end user to apply their own preferences and choose from the range of options that are available to them. This matter becomes doubly important when the GSCC Code of Practice is taken into consideration which states that the proper promotion of the life choices of end users includes the right of these said users to ‘control’ their lives, i.e. they must learn to exhibit and subsequently practice their choice and opinions in making informed decisions about the choices they receive; all in an order to make increase their power over the construction of their lives. [5] The landscape of the agency is now quite different from that which was seen in 1985. Today, there are more than thirty five people on the agency’s payroll who work with a whole array of privileged people with an age span ranging from sixteen years to sixty five years. In addition to this, people working with the agency have the liberty to work only with individuals or with entire groups. The practices conducted by the agency exemplify the mechanism of regardless of any occupational pressures or prerequisites applied b the agency. The agency is big on the concept of supported employment and pushes the entire mechanism through its occupational practices such as vocational profiling, job developing, job matching, job coaching, training, fading, natural supports, on-going monitoring and evaluation, courses and career progression. In addition to its purposes that have already been discussed, the vision of the agency is to establish a mechanism which can allow these individuals to be integrated back into society as constructive segments; a process which involves developing a whole spectrum of activities based on educational, training and employment initiatives and also invaluable opportunities with local business and key service providers as well as council directorates. The most important thing to note here, in keeping with the theme of this paper is that the agency is able to bring together these resources through partnership building with the key components of the society who are pivotal to this process; components on who light has been shed earlier. For lack of a more pertinent explanation, the agency works in close quarters with these individuals in order to build their innate feeling of independence and self sustainability and remove any lingering doubts of exclusion or discrimination that these individuals have to face with regards to their disabilities in the face of society’s constricted point of view. ‘Valuing People’; a topic on which a white paper was recently published is that part of the law that emphasizes the role of the agency and promulgates the importance of the service that is being provided by the agency to the public in general which is its consistent struggle to enable disabled people to enjoy a thorough and joyous life experience and also to be able to align themselves with the society and not feel alienated or threatened by the society at all; alignment which also includes the proper entitlement of employment and a completely fair process of evaluation. [6] The agency of my placement has a unique setup about it i.e. ten different teams are put in place in order to support the end service users, all of whom provide a different range of services and skills sets for the final users. A key thing to note here is the importance of the interaction of these then groups whereby it is essentially important for these people to work in unison with each other and support each other in order to create better services for the end users i.e. the aim is to synergize at every level to maximize the benefits gained from the inputs that are being put into the system. Another key component of good partnership building within the teams that are operational inside the agency is also the reliance on the notion that any end user will not leave without assistance of any sort; achievable through the internal mailing process of the agency. Consistent usage of white notice boards inside the organizations is also a vital factor in streamlining the communication process as there is decreased wastage of time in determination and ascertaining activities of member of the agency. The demarcated teams conduct a meeting every two weeks in which they discuss the prospects of the clients which are placed under their supervision, providing feedback to each other and finally planning on uncovering new mechanisms for the acquiring employment opportunities for these end users. In addition to this, the teams also formulate a contact sheet for the end user for whose support mechanism the team has been placed, a process which also involves these teams contacting the parents of these end users or their guardians. The soft structure and overall culture of the agency is abundantly candid yet thoroughly professional with no room for tomfoolery; colleagues working in the agency address each other with their respective first names and are completely aware of each other’s lives outside the agency as well. Another key component of the open culture of the agency is that there are no hierarchical nuances which have to be strictly followed, the room of the senior manager is always open to anyone and everyone who has a problem, barring when she is in a meeting. There is a complete open door policy inside the organization whereby anyone can drop in on a colleague without prior official notification and if a team member needs to discuss some matters privately with an end user and no other space is available; the room of the senior manager is always available for any such consultations. In the field, the team focuses itself on the task basis theory whereby it sets hurdles for the end users to cover through proper job coaching and also provide support systems for the end users whilst they are at their occupations until the team is able to guarantee that the end user is able to complete the job they has been appropriated to him/ her properly without any assistance from the team. This mechanism also helps the agency build partnerships with the companies that offer employment to the end users of the agency. [7] Bibliography: 1. Barrett et al, (2005) Inter-professional working in health and social care: professional perspectives. London. Palgrave MacMillan 2. Dickinson, H (2008) Why partnership working needs interprofessional training available online : http://communitycare.co.uk 3. Every Child Matters (2004) Change for children available online: http://everychildmatters.gov.uk 4. Hudson,B. (2002) Inter-professionality in health and social care: the Achilles heel of partnership? Journal of inter-professional care 16 (1) 5. National Occupational Standards, (2004) skills for care 6. Warren,J (2008) Service User and career participation in social work, Learning Matters, Exeter. 7. Wilson, K, et al (2008) Social work: an introduction to contemporary practice. Pearson, Edinburgh. Read More