Collaboration in Social Work Practice

Jenny Weinstein, Tony Leiba

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781849852951
• eBook ISBN: 9781846424151
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

New or experienced social workers who are developing their collaborative practice with service users and carers and with other professionals, will find this book to be an essential source of knowledge, skills and issues for reflection. The authors explain how practitioners in social care, health and related sectors can work more effectively together in line with current developments in policy and practice, offering a critical appraisal both of the benefits and the challenges.

The authors explore definitions of collaborative work, describe policy and research and give examples from their experiences of interprofessional practice. They emphasize the importance of building genuine partnerships between professionals, and with service users and carers in planning and providing care, service development and research. Good practice in collaborative working is described with different groups, including older people, people with mental health needs, children and families and people with learning disabilities.

Exploring the ways in which shared values and collaborative working practices can be brought together for effective interprofessional provision of user-focused services, this informative book is a must-read for social workers and other professionals involved with social care and health services.

PART I

Service Users, Professionals
and the Collaborative Context

Chapter 1

Collaboration and Partnership
in Context

Colin Whittington

Introduction

On each working day, and at night too, social workers will be found busily in discussion with colleagues from their own teams and organizations and from other agencies. The discussion does not take place instead of professional practices, but as an essential part of it. The colleagues involved may be other social workers, or nurses, personal care staff, therapists, doctors, housing staff, lawyers, police officers, administrators or one of the many other occupations who together make up the multi-disciplinary network of contemporary care.

Their discussion may be focused on trying to understand the nature of a social care problem, to determine a course of action, to secure a service for someone in need or to re-establish help that has broken down. A kaleidoscope of factors enters the exchange: the views of service users and carers, service policies and structures, inter-agency agreements, professional cultures and methodologies, power and status, budgets and care resources, time, priorities and personal styles. The parties may reach agreement quickly, spend time negotiating or find themselves working to resolve real differences of view. This is collaboration with other professions and agencies, in action.

The scenario is not new (Whittington 1983, 1998) but one thing certainly is. For the first time, there is a declared belief at virtually all points of the social care spectrum, from government (DoH 1998d), through the organizations that review services and their performance (Audit Commission 2000), to training and the front line (Whittington and Bell 2001), that:

• partnerships between agencies are essential to delivering the objectives of care services

• skilled collaboration between the staff who deliver the services is indispensable in making those partnerships work.

It is also recognized that the ideas of partnership and collaboration must condition the relationship of agencies and care professionals with service users and carers, by putting service users at the ‘heart of the enterprise’ (SSI 2001, paragraph 1.10). Service users and carers and their representatives are pressing for more direct influence and involvement both in the decisions that affect them individually and in decisions about services (Beresford 2002). They also wish services to work in partnership and professionals to collaborate, and they seek this with good reason (Audit Commission 2002). Service isolation and fragmentation can result in lack of co-ordination, poor communication with service users, users spending longer periods away from home and increased service costs (Audit Commission 2000; Nuffield 1997).

In the early 1990s, social workers were already reporting in detail the great importance they attached to skills in working with other professions and organizations (Whittington and Bell 2001). There is still some way to go, but the wider system is at last catching up with them by promoting the systematic learning opportunities and service structures that collaborative practice requires and by making co-operation with other professionals an explicit expectation (DoH 2002c; GSCC 2002).

The aim of this book is to respond to and support these developments and the objectives for significantly improved care services that they embody. Our purpose is to contribute to more effective collaboration by social workers with other professionals, agencies and service users by offering analysis of collaboration and partnership, exploring their policy and practice contexts and sharing evidence and examples of good practice. This first chapter will:

• say what we mean by collaboration and partnership and some related concepts

• review the foundation and progress of collaboration between services and their staff in the context of national policies

• outline some dimensions of collaboration and partnership in care services

• reflect on some further dimensions of collaboration and partnership and, in the process, signal possible directions for future critique and development.

What is meant by collaboration and partnership?

The terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership’ are often used together in ways that assume common agreement on their meaning and are sometimes treated as interchangeable. This need not be especially problematic during day-to-day practice, or even in an edited collection on the subject; the editors here have not insisted on a single usage. However, an attempt to distinguish them and to clarify their meaning does help to detect dimensions that may otherwise be lost. The terms also tend to be used as if their purpose and beneficiaries are always clear and self-evident. It will become apparent later that the position is more complicated than that.

To begin with ‘partnership’, there are no absolutes, but working in partnership tends to be the formal, institutional-level label attached to the idea of ‘working together’. It is how government policies express the expectation of so-called joined-up services (DoH 1998e) and what the Audit Commission calls ‘mandatory partnership working’ (1998). Second, it is how agencies and professionals describe what they are doing together to respond to service users, carers and communities whose requirements extend beyond the responsibilities or resources of one professional group or agency. Third, it refers to arrangements between a service or services and representatives of service users and carers involved, for example, in planning, delivery or monitoring of services.

Turning to collaboration, this may be thought of as the more active form of ‘working together’. Collaboration is the collection of knowledge, skills, values and motives applied by practitioners to translate the following into effective practice:

• formal systematic joint working arrangements (such as inter-disciplinary or integrated teams)

• less formalized joint work between different professions and agencies arising in the course of assessing for, arranging, providing and evaluating services (sometimes called multi-agency or multi-professional networks)

• the goals of participation, empowerment and social inclusion of service users and carers.

In summary, the following usages are suggested:

• Partnership is a state of relationship, at organizational, group, professional or inter-personal level, to be achieved, maintained and reviewed.

• Collaboration is an active process of partnership in action.

The lexicon of partnership and collaboration contains a number of other terms. They fall into two sub-sets and both imply degrees of shared purpose (Barton and Quinn 2001; Lupton 2001). The first sub-set is concerned with organizations and includes terms such as multi-agency working and inter-agency or inter-organizational working. Sometimes the word ‘team’ is appended as in multi-agency team. Government policies have placed particular emphasis on the importance of effective partnership between agencies. This stance has real strengths since organizational and inter-organizational dimensions are too easily overlooked. Professionals are naturally concerned with their relationships with service users and with one another, yet organizations frame much of what takes place in those relationships.

However, the establishment of inter-agency partnership policies will not automatically lead to effective front-line partnerships between separate professions (Hudson 2002b). This is where the second sub-set of terms assists. It is concerned with the professions or disciplines involved and with types of collaboration variously described as multi-professional or multi-disciplinary practice and interprofessional or inter-disciplinary practice. Again, the word ‘team’ may be added, as in inter-disciplinary team.

A key difference within the two sub-sets is found in the prefixes ‘multi’ and ‘inter’. The term ‘multi’ tends to be used where agencies, professions or team members work in parallel, maintaining distinctive organizational, intellectual and professional boundaries. The prefix ‘inter’ is associated with greater interaction, integration and adaptation, the merging of ideas and creation of new practices. In actuality, forms of professional and agency co-operation vary around these two types, multi and inter, and it helps to be clear in any particular case which of them, or some hybrid form, applies.

All of the terms in the two sub-sets above convey important dimensions, yet each represents only part of the collaborative enterprise. Terms concerned with profession and discipline tend to overlook the many unqualified staff of care services and to exclude, as we have seen, the agency dimension, while none directly encompasses collaboration with service users and carers (Nolan and Badger 2002). Some of these limitations can be overcome by thinking more broadly of ‘collaborative practice’, an idea that unifies many of the terms. There are also advantages in using models that connect the key terms and dimensions of collaborative practice. A model of collaboration is described in Chapter 2.

The national policy context of collaboration and partnership

During the late 1980s and the 1990s, after countless false starts and decades of legislative lip-service (Loxley 1997), questions of inter-agency and interprofessional working began to move up the national policy agenda. The Thatcher Conservative government of the 1980s, worrying about spiralling costs, service fragmentation and inefficient use of resources in community care, sought solutions with the radical reforms of the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 (DoH 1989; Griffiths 1988). This made local authorities responsible, in co-operation with medical, nursing and other interests, for assessing individual need, designing care arrangements and securing their delivery.

The Act introduced three central changes to community care: first, an assessment and care management system intended to be needs-led and to implement effective inter-agency co-ordination; second, demarcated purchaser and provider functions within and between local social service agencies and others; and, third, the goal of more effective joint planning (Lewis and Glennester 1996). The aim was to achieve what the Minister of Health Virginia Bottomley...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Part I: Service Users, Professionals and the Collaborative Context
• Part II: Collaboration in Practice
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest