Need, Risk and Protection in Social Work Practice

Steve Hothersall, Mike Maas-Lowit, Steve Hothersall, Mike Maas-Lowit

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781844452521
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781844456581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a detailed and comprehensive guide to working with risk. It begins by looking at notions of need, vulnerability and protection and looks at the theoretical concepts of each before applying them to practice. By using this combination of theory and practice the authors are able to integrate policy for a wide range of services users, from older people to children, families and younger adults. Case studies accompany and illustrate each method and the reader is invited to engage in a number of exercises and activities to consolidate learning.

Part One

Chapter 1

Need and vulnerability

Steve J Hothersall

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ACHIEVING A SOCIAL WORK DEGREE

In this book, both the National Occupational Standards in Social Work and the Scottish Standards in Social Work Education will be referred to.

National Occupational Standards

Key Role 1: Prepare for, and work with, individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to assess their needs and circumstances.

• Work with individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to enable them to analyse, identify, clarify and express their strengths, expectations and limitations.
• Work with individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to enable them to assess and make informed decisions about their needs, circumstances, risks, preferred options and resources.
• Assess and review the preferred options of individuals, families, carers, groups and communities.
• Assess needs, risks and options taking into account legal and other requirements.
• Assess and recommend an appropriate course of action for individuals, families, carers, groups and communities.

Key Role 2: Plan, carry out, review and evaluate social work practice, with individuals, families, carers, groups, communities and other professionals.

• Identify the need for legal and procedural intervention.
• Plan and implement action to meet the immediate needs and circumstances.
• Regularly monitor, review and evaluate changes in needs and circumstances.

Key Role 3: Support individuals to represent their needs, views and circumstances.

• Advocate for, and with, individuals, families, carers, groups and communities.

Key Role 4: Manage risk to individuals, families, carers, groups, communities, self and colleagues.

• Identify and assess the nature of the risk.
• Balance the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families, carers, groups and communities with associated risk.
• Regularly monitor, re-assess, and manage risk to individuals, families, carers, groups and communities.

Key Role 5: Manage and be accountable, with supervision and support, for your own social work practice within your organisation.

• Carry out duties using accountable professional judgement and knowledge-based social work practice.
• Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your programme of work in meeting the organisational requirements and the needs of individuals, families, carers, groups and communities.

Key Role 6: Demonstrate professional competence in social work practice.

• Identify and assess issues, dilemmas and conflicts that might affect your practice.
• Devise strategies to deal with ethical issues, dilemmas and conflicts.
• Reflect on outcomes.

Scottish Standards in Social Work Education

Key Role 1: Prepare for, and work with, individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to assess their needs and circumstances.

• Assessing needs and options in order to recommend a course of action.

Key Role 2: Plan, carry out, review and evaluate social work practice with individuals, families, carers, groups, communities and other professionals.

• Identifying and responding to crisis situations.
• Working with individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to achieve change, promote dignity, realise potential and improve life opportunities.
• Producing, implementing and evaluating plans with individuals, families, carers, groups, communities and colleagues.
• Developing networks to meet assessed needs and planned outcomes.
• Working with groups to promote choice and independent living.

Key Role 3: Assess and manage risk to individuals, families, carers, groups, communities, self and colleagues.

• Assessing and managing risks to individuals, families, carers, groups and communities.

Key Role 4: Demonstrate professional competence in social work practice.

• Working within agreed standards of social work practice.
• Understanding and managing complex ethical issues, dilemmas and conflicts.

Key Role 5: Manage and be accountable, with supervision and support, for your own social work practice within your organisation.

• Contributing to the management of resources and services.
• Working effectively with professionals within integrated, multi-disciplinary and other service settings.

Key Role 6: Support individuals to represent and manage their needs, views and circumstances.

• Representing, in partnership with, and on behalf of, individuals, families, carers, groups and communities to help them achieve and maintain greater independence.

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Introduction

This chapter introduces you to the central concept of need in its many guises and helps you to think about these in relation to social work and social care. We shall also consider how need is often treated as a somewhat relativistic concept and one having connections to other themes, including vulnerability, risk and protection.

The chapter draws on a range of ideas from different and sometimes disparate disciplines so that we can begin to think about need more creatively and understand why, within the context of late modern societies, need is very much at the forefront of discussions around welfare, social work and social care practice and how, within human services, the derivations of vulnerability, risk and protection manifest as specific policy and practice-related issues and what relevance and influence these have in terms of your day-to-day practice as a social/care worker.

First, when we talk about ‘need(s)’, what is it we are in fact referring to? What is a ‘need’? What sorts of ‘needs’ do we have? Do we all have the same needs? Are some needs more important than others and if so, which ones and why these? Who should meet them? Should we be responsible for ourselves, or does the state have a responsibility towards us, or should it be someone else entirely, such as a family member or a friend who carries that responsibility? If the state is seen as having a role, which it clearly does in the UK, how should it do this? And does this mean that we have a right to such provision? Furthermore, any discussion about need presupposes some awareness of what it is we mean when we talk about ‘welfare’, as need and welfare are inextricably connected and we also have to consider the issue of fairness or social justice (Newman and Yeats, 2008) in terms of how need ought to be responded to.

Definitions, theories and interpretations of need

When beginning to think about any idea, concept or issue, it is often useful to go to the dictionary as a starting point. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) (OUP, 2007) offers us the following in relation to ‘need’:

Need:

1. Necessity for a course of action arising from facts or circumstances.
2. Necessity or demand for the presence, possession, etc., of something.
3. A condition or time of difficulty, distress, or trouble; exigency, emergency, crisis.
4. A condition of lacking or requiring some necessary thing, either physically or (now) psychologically; destitution, lack of the means of subsistence or of necessaries, poverty. Now also a condition of requiring or being motivated to do, a necessity to do.

Some of these definitions, especially number 4, will be quite useful to us in understanding what we mean by the term ‘need’. So what is a need? In a broad sense it is generally taken to refer to the state that pertains in the absence of something that is deemed to be necessary, usually for the continued and often basic functioning of the organism; it is something which, if not adequately met, is likely to compromise the capacity of the organism to meet other needs and therefore promote and maintain wellbeing and at the extreme, an unmet need may actually threaten survival.

What types of need are there?

We have to think about how we define and describe need and how and why we categorise and prioritise it as we do.

Below we look at a number of different interpretations and theories of need and try to establish how meaningful these are in relation to social work/care practice. For example, one way of thinking broadly about this is to list these as physical needs, psychological needs, emotional needs and social needs. We could also add spiritual needs to this.

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ACTIVITY 1.1

Using the categories above, draw up a list of needs that all human beings would share.

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Comment

What did you come up with? Your list could potentially be endless, such is the span of human need. However, here is a short, basic, but by no means comprehensive list for you to compare yours with.

Physical = Water, food, shelter, warmth, reproduction.

Psychological = Stimulation, cognitive activity.

Emotional = Love, affection, trust, understanding.

Social = Contact with others, friends.

Spiritual = Communion with others and with one’s beliefs

Would you say then that these are some of our basic or primary needs? In order to claim that this is so, we have to be sure that these are generalisable to all of us and that a failure to have these needs met would result in our capacity to function being impaired to the extent that it might result in us being unable to meet other needs and, taken to extremes threaten our very existence. If this is indeed so, this appears to suggest some kind of essential criterion or hierarchy regarding (basic) needs and you might also have recognised connections between these differing types of need.

We should also think about whether the distinction between physical, psychological, emotional, social and spiritual needs is ‘real’ or whether it is too artificial. Could all of the needs to which we have referred be seen as essentially social? We could use this sense of the term social on the basis that all these needs affect our capacity to be social beings, so they are essentially social needs. This brings in another dimension: to what extent are our (basic) needs able to be met without reference to society (i.e. other people and structures)? Can an individual meet his or her needs alone or do we need the structure of a society around us to facilitate this? For example, how would you ensure a clean supply of water? Would you have the knowledge and skills necessary to find water (in the absence of taps and bottled water in the shops, which are clearly developments resulting from a long human history of social cooperation)? Would you have the ability to ensure that the water was disease free? How would you guarantee the source? The same would apply to food sources and, particularly, to those needs seen as psychological and emotional, which depend almost entirely for their satisfaction on the availability of others (that is, they are socially oriented).

Some writers would in fact argue that all our realities are socially constructed and socially mediated (Berger and Luckman, 1979; Searle, 1995) including our sense of who we are (Cooley, 1904/1998; Mead, 1934) and how we develop psychologically (Vygotsky, 1978).

Doyal and Gough, citing Nevitt, make the following point:

Social needs are demands which have been defined by society as sufficiently important to qualify for social recognition as goods or services, which should be met by government intervention.

(Nevitt, 1977, p115 in Doyal and Gough, 1991, p10)

We shall consider this point below when we look at the history of need. We shall see that society has generally and for a long, long time deemed that some needs are so important and all encompassing that the most effective way to meet them is to do so collectively, via the creation and impl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Steve J Hothersall and Mike Maas-Lowit
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• References
• Index