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Health, Welfare and Practice
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Health, Welfare and Practice
Reflecting on Roles and Relationships

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December 1992 | 256 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Bringing together key issues in the provision and use of caring services, this volume is an invaluable training resource for health and social work practitioners. Roles and relationships are central themes: their complexity is stressed, as is their relevance to a better understanding of practice.

The book's first three sections explore: the distinctions between health and welfare occupations, and informal helping roles; different approaches for practitioners to develop sensitivity to diverse experiences and to challenge unfairly discriminatory responses, attitudes and stereotyped assumptions; and the potential for user empowerment, given the imbalance in power between workers and users. These areas provide practitioners with sources for reflection in the final section.

This unique collection encompasses both personal accounts and important current debates. It blends research with practice, and experience with academic insight. Throughout, readers are encouraged to make links across occupational divides and to challenge traditional assumptions.

The volume is a Course Reader for the Open University course Roles and Relationships: Perspectives on Practice K663.

 
Introduction
Roles and Relationships in Health and Welfare

 
 
PART ONE: EXPERIENCE AND EXPERTISE
Jan Williams
What is a Profession? Experience versus Expertise
Donald Sch[um]on
Reflection-in-Action
Everett C Hughes
License and Mandate
Jan Walmsley
It's Not What You Do but Who You Are
Caring Roles and Caring Relationships

 
Gillian Dalley
Professional Ideology or Organizational Tribalism? The Health Service-Social Work Divide
Jenny Kitzinger, Josephine Green and Vanessa Coupland
Labour Relations
Midwives and Doctors on the Labour Ward

 
Ruth Purtilo
Meaningful Distances
Patrick Wakeling
Wounded Healers
Awakenings

 
Gerry Stimson and Barbara Webb
The Face-to-Face Interaction and After the Consultation
Elizabeth Roberts
Pregnancy and Childbirth
A Historical Perspective

 
George Orwell
How the Poor Die
 
PART TWO: DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION
Jill Reynolds
Feminist Theory and Strategy in Social Work
Don Naik
Towards an Anti-racist Curriculum in Social Work Training
Jalna Hanmer and Daphne Statham
Commonalities and Diversities between Women Clients and Women Social Workers
Amina Mama
Violence against Black Women
Gender, Race and State Responses

 
Yasmin Alibhai
Black Nightingales
Sara Arber and Nigel Gilbert
Men
The Forgotten Carers

 
Gladys Elder
The Alienated
Growing Old Today

 
Norma Pitfield
Making Gardens from Wildernesses
The Lives of Older Women

 
Maggie Woolley
Acquired Hearing Loss
Acquired Oppression

 
 
PART THREE: EMPOWERMENT AND POWER
Roger Gomm
Issues of Power in Health and Welfare
Vic Finkelstein
From Curing or Caring to Defining Disabled People
Nora Ellen Groce
A Community's Adaptation to Deafness
David Ward and Audrey Mullender
Empowerment and Oppression
An Indissoluble Pairing for Contemporary Social Work

 
Christopher Brown and Charles Ringma
New Disability Services
The Critical Role of Staff in a Consumer-directed Empowerment Model

 
W David Wills
The Barns Experiment
Maggie Potts and Rebecca Fido
Resisting the System
Anita Binns
Anita's Story
Sheelagh Strawbridge
Rules, Roles and Relationships
 
PART FOUR: REFLECTING ON PRACTICE
Barbara Webb
Trauma and Tedium
An Account of Living on a Children's Ward

 
Gillian Chapman
Ritual and Rational Action in Hospitals
Naomi Craft
A Feeling for Medicine
Tom Heller
Personal and Medical Memories from Hillsborough
Graham Connelly
Conflicts in the Residential Keyworker Role
John Simmonds
Thinking about Feelings in Group Care
Liz Lloyd
Reflections on Short-term Casework
Tara Mistry
Establishing a Feminist Model of Groupwork in the Probation Service
Robert Bor, Lucy Perry and Riva Miller
When the Solution becomes a Part of the Problem
Kate Lyon
Conclusion
Why Study Roles and Relationships?

 

`A dazzling variety of articles drawn from almost the entire health and welfare spectrum. The problem is what to read first. Should it be George Orwell's account of death in a Paris hospital in 1929, or GP Tom Heller's memories of the Hillsborough disaster? There is meat for the academically minded alongside telling insights from service users like Anita Binns, a woman with learning disabilities. The emphasis on roles and relationships holds the collection together and frees many of the writers to set aside professional status and use their personal experience to inform the search for better practice. If only the book was likely to be read by all the professional know-it-alls who think they are above their clients' - Health Service Journal

`many nuggets worth mining, and it is a valuable teaching resource.' - Medical Sociology News

`useful because it collects together disparate material in one place ... This book represents the resurgence of role analysis in social work ... One of the assets of the book is its material from both health and social work professions ... this book asserts and demonstrates extremely well and interestingly the value of self-reflection in professional practice' - British Journal of Social Work

`This book has a number of strengths. All of the chapters are brief and well focused ... many of [them] stand as excellent vehicles for stimulating class discussion... I think this book has excellent applicability to the education of students of a variety of health and human service occupations' - Disability Studies Quarterly

`This Open University Reader focuses on reflective practice from a multi-occupational perspective, using roles and relationships as its organising theme. It is written for an audience of trainers, teachers, students and workers to develop practice in health and welfare.... This is a very good reader whose contents provide rich, varied and moving material for health and welfare professionals' - Disability and Society