Page 1 of 4

Conclusion

You will have seen in this learning object how the following barriers can adversely affect communication between social workers and the people with whom they work:

  • Lack of time and an inappropriate environment
  • Negative perceptions of the social work role, task and identity
  • Poor use of self by social workers
  • Strong feelings, faulty perceptions and life stage issues which dominate the situation
  • Interpersonal dynamics
  • Power differences and misuse of power by professionals
  • Special communication needs with which the social worker struggles

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Conclusion

What have you learned from this learning object about how to reduce these barriers in different professional roles and environments? For example, how might you deal with the following:

  • Making visits to noisy and busy family homes where the tv is left on
  • Working with people who are angry about your involvement
  • Having nowhere or no time to do play-based work with younger children

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Conclusion

Final task:

Put together a plan of action for dealing with potential communication barriers: Using the areas that have been covered throughout this learning object, work through the tasks below to help improve your awareness and understanding of barriers to communication in your daily work.

  • Identify three of the most frequent barriers that you face in your daily role, or that you think are the most important to tackle.

  • Using the information from the learning object write down on the notepad a strategy for dealing with these barriers in your current work situation.

  • Print these out and refer back to these as a reminder when undertaking an assessment.

  • Review these strategies in supervision in 1 month's time to see whether they have been effective and design a new action plan if they have not.

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Conclusion

If you would like to learn more about Communication Skills, please visit SCIE's other e-learning resources on the SCIE web site (http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/elearning/index.asp).


You have now reached the end of this learning object. You may want to go back and re-visit sections as sometimes things only make sense second or third time round! You can also visit the References section now for ideas for extra reading/research.