communication skills

Social care governance: A practice workbook

This workbook sets out to show how social care governance is made up of many of social care’s core activities, familiar to practitioners. It puts social care governance into direct practice by taking a team audit approach. This helps teams reflect on and evaluate their practice, using the knowledge SCIE has gathered, to make improvements. The audit framework helps the wider organisation to learn from practice.

Forming and maintaining relationships with service users, carers, professionals and others

This resource looks at the benefits that are gained from the relationships that are built within social work. Using the voices of service users, carers and workers will be possible to understand how the relationships that were created helped them to deal with the difficulties they faced. This resource will allow the understanding of the importance of relationships in social work and the personal attributes needed to form and maintain positive working relationships.

Caring for someone with dementia: communicating

The Alzheimer's Society is the UK's leading care and research charity for people with dementia, their families and carers. They produce information and advice sheets to support those affected by dementia. The Alzheimer’s Society receives around 1,000 enquiries a year about the law relating to dementia. This information sheet gives answers to some of the most common types of questions.

Exploring beliefs and values

This exercise is designed to prompt participants to ‘surface’ the beliefs and values that underlie their reactions to the situations that children are in. This exercise is usually carried out with a large group split into smaller groups of 4 – 5 people. It lasts approximately 90 minutes.

Fear of the Unknown : addressing fears, myths, attitudes and values around child protection issues

The aim of this workshop is to dispel the fears of people who are relatively new to child protection issues, and those who feel it is a muddy area of legislation and uncomfortable procedures for themselves and the children and young people they work with.

The beauty of this workshop is it can be used for introduction to child protection issues or to update existing knowledge or beliefs. The exercise lasts between 1 to 3 hours and is suitable for groups of 3 to 20.

SCIE knowledge review 06: teaching and learning communication skills in social work education

Good communication, both oral and written, is at the heart of best practice in social work. Communication skills are essential for establishing effective and respectful relationships with service users, and are also essential for assessments, decision making and joint working with colleagues and other professionals.

Sally : Drugs : Case Narrative

This short training scenario was originally used in the context of introductory child protection training. It gives brief information from which participants are asked to identify what they are concerned about and what they would do next. Sally uses drugs and is pregnant. She has a history of local authority care.

Particular communication needs

This resource starts with a quiz and a short case study to help the user understand the complexities of defining and identifying impairment as well as the difficulties faced by people who have these impairments. Then it will be able to explore four different scenarios which present tips on working with particular communication needs of service users.