Social Work

Social Work Service, Brentwood Division West Los Angeles VA Medical Center 11301 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90073... 

All who live with MCS struggle with these questions How do you create a positive life when you no longer can socialize, work, attend church or community events, shop, travel or sit in a movie theater without unpleasant, if not serious, consequences to your health How do others with MCS cope and what gives them hope when medical treatments, safe housing, relationships, career options and self-esteem slip between their fingers ... 

According to information presented in the passage, music therapy can be prescribed for social work clients who... 

Social Work The use of community resources, individual case work, or group work to promote the adaptive capacities of individuals in relation to their social and economic environments. It includes social service agencies. [NIH]... 

The grandparents and aunt were contacted via two social work area teams where the children were living with their relatives under supervision or residence orders and through two Glasgow support groups set up specifically by and for relative carers. 

At the moment I see my mum every week but sometimes my mum doesn t turn up... And the same goes for my dad... I meet them in the social work office... She just says she forgot, or, she had to see somebody. I tell her that it makes me feel sad. She says, Sorry, son ... That s it. 

But like if you go like that I don t want to stay here and all that - but you do want to stay with her, you just don t want to stay with her the way she is, you want her to get better and all that - and then she does that Aye well you know what to do and all that, meaning go up to the social work and put yourself in care and all that... You do want to stay with her when you say that, it s just you don t want to stay with her like that, you want her to be a normal ma... The longest she s been like that is about a month. 

Know how, like my ma was taking stuff and all that and the social work didn t really know and I d be left with Will [her 3-year-old brother] and all that and I had to like take care of him and all that... And like my pals, they d come up for me and I just wouldn t go out to play cos I was scared for my wee brother and that, what would happen like if she dropped her fag or something because she s nearly set the house alight with her fag I don t know how many times... 

Social work intervention had led to the placement of children in about half of these cases. Social workers did not always initiate these proceedings it could as easily happen that the relative carer would make contact with social work to alert them to the situation and also to try to elicit their support, not often successfully or, often, to their minds, very effectively. The most likely reason for intervention was concern that the child was at risk through parental preoccupation with drugs, as in the following case ... 

There were also cases where social work had removed children from their parents as a matter of emergency. The extended family might have to make an immediate decision to take children, knowing that they would be placed in foster or other care if they said no ... 

One day social work contacted me at work and said.,. did I know that my youngest grandson had been burnt... 1 rushed home in a state and I couldn t find my daughter so I phoned social work up and I said to them I want these children if they are going into care ...so about half nine that night they brought the two children. So, I had no access to the children s clothes or toys or anything. I couldn t get into her home. I had no keys. The children came with what they stood in. 

My daughter is a drug addict and an alcoholic. She had Jacob when she was 23. Both of them, Jacob and May, came to live with us when they came out of hospital but May just disappeared and never came back for him, literally never came back for him... Then she went on, later on, to have Joe who is now six. She put him into social work care in November 2001 just for a rest but she never came back for him either... Just disappeared. Went and got on with her drug life. 

As I says to [social worker] the reason why I don t ask them for anything is that I don t want them thinking that I ve only got these weans to get money off the social work. That s not why I ve got these weans. I ve got these weans because I want to have them. They re my grand weans and I d rather have them than see some stranger with them. But as [social... 

Historically, the highest proportion of referrals to social work come from health visitors (Dingwall and Robinson 1993), which indicates both the breadth of their contact with families in the community and their watchfulness over the welfare of the child. The duality of their role as both supportive and monitoring, although not always comfortable, is part of a learned understanding of what it is to be a health visitor ... 

Clearly these are all possibilities and would need to be taken into account in any subsequent review. One can see that although these workers were clear that there was a problem and most wanted social work to be informed, they were also actively engaged in a search for a more optimistic interpretation of the situation to allow a more informal response ... 

Two major sources of resentment were identifiable the first concerned the perception that social workers expected other practitioners to act as their eyes and ears and police their clients. The second concerned the potential treatment of a case once it had passed onto social work. Both issues connected intimately with their continued engagement with the adult client and/or children. The following health visitor provided a clear example of this ... 

We re supposed to work as part of a multi-disciplinary group and I think sometimes the social work department have unrealistic expectations as to what, or they don t know what the role of the health visitor is and just because they re not getting access they think that we can demand rights of access in to a home. And I, I feel as, I don t always necessarily get access into a home but if they come to me at the clinic, which some of them do, I content myself with that, that I m getting contact with the family and I don t want to break down the relationship that I have by demanding access into their home, I don t have any right to access, I m invited into their homes. 

Again this was couched in terms of the referring practitioner s concern to retain the relationship. Health visitors too found themselves in this situation they reported being asked, in particular by teachers, to refer welfare problems to the social work department. This dynamic was objected to on... 

A recurrently raised problem for the referring workers (whether drug workers or health visitors) was that in transferring the case to social work, there was the possibility of a different interpretation of how best to respond to the case. Most commonly for drug workers was uneasiness over a narrow focus on a child protection agenda. There was the expressed anxiety that the response might be overly coercive ... 

I would obviously be quite reluctant [to refer this vignette case] in case, you know, the social work department decided that she wasn t capable of looking after her kids, and the implication s there, because unfortunately the social workers tell clients. I ve seen this, that cruelty... they re going to take your weans away, kind of thing, you know. And I think that part of our job is to get them to understand that that s not the case, that s always a last resort. That s a big part of our job. 

Just about a year ago 1 was on the phone all the time, wrote letters to social work, but they never respond to you and then it did all explode you know and I felt isolated being the only worker going into this home and no one would really take my referral seriously enough until there was a crisis and then the police, they had to get an order for care and protection and then children in hospital by that point, too late...two drug dependent parents. I was very, very concerned. 

Children and family social work services in the UK are chronically understaffed the remaining staff are often demotivated and stressed by the volume of work, and the strain of working with difficult, frequently highly conflictual and chronic child protection cases. Many of the drug workers and health visitors expressed their sense of social work as a service in crisis, with extremely limited capacity to respond to anything other than the worst child protection cases, triggered usually by incidents rather than the chronic accumulation of problems ... 

DW2 That s right, that s what we find, we were talking about the blue lights flashing, once that starts, that s when you ll get your, you know what I mean [social work support], it s got to get to that point most of the time. 

Barnard, M. (2003) Between a rock and a hard place the role of relatives in protecting children from the effects of parental drug problems. Child and Family Social Work 8, 291-299. 

---