Social Worker Sharing

  I attended a seminar this week which was provided as a space for practitioners to discuss Social Work in a pandemic. It was an interesting session to attend and allowed me to link up with people who work all over the country and hear their perspectives. I always forget how different my experience of Social Work education and starting my career has been because of the pandemic. I think because it is all I have known it doesn't feel strange to me. It was not until I mentioned that I have been in my team in various capacities for approximately 14 months but have never been in my office and saw the reactions that I was reminded. People in the session who have been practising for many years were so shocked and this led to an interesting discussion about the amount of information you can learn from being in the office and overhearing it. They talked about working somewhere for a while and only knowing about certain paperwork because a colleague mentioned it in passing. I explaine...

  Something that has been discussed a lot the last 2 years or so is the impact that the pandemic has had on Social Work practice. A lot of the conversations around this both with colleagues and in the research or articles that have been written about it focus on how it has impacted the Social Worker. Both in their day-to-day practice but also the impact it has had on their work life balance, mental health, and stress levels. It has definitely had this impact because the way that people are used to working have been taken away at very short notice and everyone has had to adapt to new ways of working. I do think that a lot of the focus have been on the professionals and how they are managing but when doing some minor research prior to writing this post I could not find anything from the people who access services about how they have found receiving Social Work support in the pandemic. I know that in general the pandemic has increased levels of loneliness, domestic violence, an...