The Children's Trust operates a rehabilitation centre for children with acquired brain injury. The service, which won "Rehabilitation Initiative of the Year - Provider" at the Rehabilitation First Wards, is described.
Casework practice is the process whereby, for example, housing officers, anti-social behaviour officers and neighbourhood wardens work with a tenant who has reported a racist incident to help resolve a complaint. This article focuses on the need for racist/hate incident case workers to be aware of the value of empowerment, and to be able to offer an empowering service when working directly with clients.
The government’s updated alcohol strategy, Safe, Sensible, Social aims to reduce the number of under-18s who drink and the amount they drink. But Alcohol Concern found that many children are being openly influenced by alcohol advertising during their favourite programmes, as explained by Don Shenker in this article.
The authors, from Dorset Council, explain how they are trying to get the best out of the Integrated Children's System despite its limitations. The ICS was intended to enable a single consistent approach to case-based information gathering, case planning, case aggregation and case reviews. As such, the easily generated and clear reports would help social workers collect, organise, analyse and retrieve information.
The government launched its Aiming High for Disabled Children's programme for May 2007 to bring about a transformation of services across health and social care. Funding was provided to local authorities and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). However, local authorities are reporting difficulties in getting PCTs to commit to developing services. In addition, funding for the programme has not been ring fenced and it is often not possible to identify what has been spent on disabled children.
There is increasing evidence that substance misuse among British adolescents is escalating (Miller & Plant, 1996; Sutherland & Willner, 1998). Swadi (1992) found that, among adolescents aged 12–17 years referred to mental health services, the prevalence of drug use was 13.1% (16.3% among boys and 9.3% among girls).
Assertive outreach primary aims to provide specialist services for people disengaged from traditional approaches of mental health services, but very little attention has been paid to how such services can develop. The Practice Based Evidence consultancy engaged with seven assertive outreach teams in England to implement an approach to practice development that focuses on team-working and adopting a specific strengths approach to its model of practice. This article summarises some of the findings and puts forward strengths-based recommendations to develop assertive outreach practice.
The Social Work Task Force has signalled its intent to come up with a new definition of social work to counter public misconceptions. Anabel Unity Sale reports that with the negative coverage that social work attracts, it is hardly surprising that the public is not clear about what social workers do, and that people are led to believe that professionals swoop in and steal babies from families, give older people with limited mobility a bath and then make their dinner.
A quiet revolution is unfolding within the worlds of addiction treatment and recovery support. This revolution is founded on new understandings of the nature of substance use disorders and their management. It calls for shifting the treatment of severe and persistent alcohol and other drug (AOD) problems from an emergency room model of acute care (AC) to a model of sustained recovery management (RM).
Knowles was convinced that adults learned differently to children - and that this provided the basis for a distinctive field of enquiry. His earlier work on informal adult education had highlighted some elements of process and setting. Similarly, his charting of the development of the adult education movement in the United States had helped him to come to some conclusions about the shape and direction of adult education. What he now needed to do was to bring together these elements. The mechanism he used was the notion of andragogy.