Social Work and ICT

Andrew Hill, Ian Shaw

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781446245071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become an integral part of social and working lives. Within social work ICTs play a vital role, helping professionals to store and share information and contributing to new forms of practice. This book goes a step further than simply describing ICT skills, but asks why ICT is used and how this affects practice and the experience of people who use services.

The book has a practical focus and includes guidance on:

Best Practice for Social Work and ICT

ICT Use in Social Work

Service Users, Carers and ICT

Technology and Professional Practice

ICT and Social Work Agencies

Social Work Programmes in the Virtual World

ICT and Practice Based Learning

Written in a student-friendly style, Social Work and ICT is interspersed with activities and exercises to enable students to develop their skills and knowledge. Each chapter also includes a ?Taking it Further? section with useful websites, suggestions for further reading and ideas to improve practice. The book has been designed to enhance professional practice and it will be essential reading for all undergraduate programmes in social work.

1

Best Practice for Social Work and ICT

In this chapter we make a set of suggestions as to how ICTs may be used to further the aims of social work in ways that accord with the values of the profession. Some of these suggestions are based on research findings that are discussed more fully later in the book, whilst other suggestions are, we acknowledge, rather more tentative in nature. We give some indication as to which is which.

Our ideas are framed as being about best practice in social work. The concept of ‘best practice’ is widely used in healthcare, as well as in business management and in the world of ICTs, to mean the most efficient and effective way of doing things: ways that use the minimum resources and yet give the optimum results. There is a danger that it can become quite a utilitarian concept. In the context of professional social work, often there are inbuilt tensions between the drive for efficiency and the need, for example, to respect the individuality of service users and to work at their pace. In their exploration of the concept of ‘best practice’ in social work Jones and colleagues argue that we must take into account the complexity and the difficulty of social work tasks where there are

no straightforward actions which could protect or promote the welfare of one person or group without possibly causing distress or even deeply hurting and restricting theirs and other’s rights and freedoms. (Jones et al., 2008: 3)

In this book we follow Jones and colleagues’ argument that best practice in social work must fit with a critical stance, and, as we remarked above, with the core aims and values of the profession. Best practice does not mean that the process or outcomes are perfect, nor that there are no constraints on what can be accomplished, but it should indicate the best that could be achieved in a specific situation, with a specific set of people and circumstances. This book seeks to develop an understanding of best practice in social work that includes the use of ICTs.

The current chapter is divided into three sections. The first discusses overarching principles that may help to define features of best practice with social work and ICTs. The second focuses in on elements of best practice in service delivery, and the final section is about best practice in professional training and ongoing professional development of social workers.

General Principles of Best Practice

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A practice-led approach

One of the commonest ways of thinking about ICTs is to regard them as tools that can be used for a variety of jobs. As new ICT tools are developed, so they are applied to existing tasks in ways that may enable them to be done more quickly, or more efficiently. But in applying ICTs in order to gain the benefits, it is often the case that the tasks themselves are changed in significant ways, regardless of whether or not any improvement is achieved.

One of us drafted this chapter. So, for example, in producing this text I am using an electronic word processor. In my case this is only marginally faster than the much older method of using pen and paper, but it has many additional benefits. The software corrects my spelling and grammar as I write, it keeps count of how many words I have written, and it enables me to send the text quickly and easily to my co-author for comment. But using a word processor has also changed the process of my writing in subtle ways. It means that I can experiment with ideas more freely, in the knowledge that I can move sentences around easily without the laborious process of having to cross out and rewrite. But it means that probably I waste more time on ‘polishing’ text, because there is no longer the need to concentrate on getting it right the first time. Word processors came into general use in the 1980s, and began to be more widely used in universities in the 1990s, so the example is dated. But new technologies continue to evolve, and a common pattern continues to be that, as they are developed, so new ways are found of using them to do existing tasks, and old ways of doing things are modified.

Social work has not been immune to this process. There is a tendency to see a new development in the field of ICTs, and possibly its application elsewhere in business, commerce or industry, and to ask how the advantages of this new technology can be brought to social work. This can be thought of as a technology-led approach. It is not without merit, but there are significant dangers. In this book we argue for an approach to ICT that is practice-led and that puts social work first.

One of the dangers of a technology-led approach is that social work comes to be understood primarily in the light of the aims of ICT developers, and evaluated in their terms. For example, recent advances in networking mean that it no longer makes sense for workers in large social work organisations to store information on the hard drives of individual computers. Common practice is to use a central filestore that can be accessed by any authorised user from any computer on the network (or sometimes over the internet). This means that there are reliable systems for data backup, and it allows rapid sharing of information. But it means that social workers no longer need their own office computer – any will do – so that the sharing of computer terminals (often called hot-desking), and mobile and home working have become widespread. This makes sense from an ICT perspective, but what of the changes to social work practice? We know that social work is stressful work that has a significant emotional content (Howe, 2008). Working face to face with service users who may be distressed, angry or otherwise disturbing in their presentation means that the emotional and other support of colleagues is, for social workers, an essential ingredient in their practice. It may be that flexible, ICT-led patterns of working undermine the cohesiveness of teams of practitioners who meet each other less frequently and less predictably. So the use of networked filestores should not be understood and evaluated from an ICT perspective alone. We need a practice-led approach that takes into account the practice perspective and, in this case, draws attention to potential disadvantages.

In this example, and more generally, best practice means a practice-led approach to the use of ICTs. We have contrasted this with a technology-led approach, but it should be acknowledged that some elements of the latter approach coincide quite closely with what we might think of as management interests in social work. For example, the introduction of central filestores fits with the management goal of increased efficiency. This complicates the argument, because we do not wish to argue for inefficient organisations – there is no benefit in that to anyone. Instead we should recognise that the concept of social work practice itself contains a complex blend of the sometimes complementary and sometimes competing interests of service users, social workers and managers. Our argument (that best practice in social work and ICT means a practice-led approach) does not exclude the interests of social work managers. More positively, adopting best practice and a practice-led approach means starting with social work practice, not with the ICTs themselves.

It is important to make a distinction within the term ‘practice-led’. For much of the book we have in mind ‘social work practice’ when we use the term ‘practice-led’. But we intend a broader meaning of the word practice. The practice of social workers, for example, is not the same as the practice of social work educators or even social work students. So when we come to Chapters 6 and 7, the agenda we address is led by the practice of learning, and by implication, the practice of facilitating that learning. The same widening of the distinction also applies when we consider aspects of ICT and service users. In Chapter 3 we give some illustrations of how the perspectives of professionals and service users part company regarding technology. Towards the end of that chapter we pose the challenging questions that arise when we suggest that it makes good, if provocative, sense to talk in terms of service user, carer and citizen-led ICT interests. Each of these discussions will caution against assuming that ‘practice-led’ will always mean ‘social work practitioner led’. But it will always be set against ‘technology-led’.

This is one reason why throughout the book we seek to understand particular contexts for social work and to ask which technologies are being used and why, and to understand how practice may be changing as a result. Best practice means that our assessment of those changes draws on the aims and values of social work as a whole.

Best practice in shaping an ICT infrastructure

Another of the dangers of a technology-led approach is the tendency in social work for purpose-built ICT systems to be experienced by those using them as profoundly user-unfriendly. In Chapter 4 we will consider a number of examples in some detail, but suffice to say that there is significant research and other evidence to show that social workers have found the introduction of electronic ways of recording and processing their day to day work to be at best distracting, and at worst frustrating and deeply unhelpful. One of the features of social workers’ critique is that the design and implementation of such systems is being imposed on them by people who don’t fully understand the job. ICT developers and the social work managers who commission and buy the products, so the argument goes, do not have sufficient understanding of the day to day realities of social work practice to come up with useful systems.

In fact, the literature about best practice in the design and development of ICT systems for organisations has long recognised this problem. Some have called for an ethnographic approach to ICT systems design: one that starts with ICT developers spending time within an organisation so as to gain detailed information about its working practices before starting work on ICT systems (for example Heath and Luff, 2000). But this approach does not entirely solve the problem. It continues to exclude users from the design process, and it is almost impossible to foresee all the implications of a new system by studying only the work practices that exist before it is introduced. Hartswood and colleagues (2002) argue for a process of ‘co-realisation’, by which they mean that ICT professionals and the ‘users’ of ICT systems should together create, implement, and continue to develop ICT systems. They suggest that the ICT professionals need to move beyond a narrow ‘engineering’ mentality and physically move to work for long periods within the organisation, not just in the design phase but, crucially, in the subsequent implementation phase. It is in this latter phase, when people actually start to make use of a system for the first time, that there is the most opportunity for users to shape both their own ICT-enabled practice and the development of the system. Yet most of the social work users of the ICT systems we will consider in this book had no contact with ICT professionals in the design phase, let alone during implementation.

If ICT professionals need to become immersed in the world and work of social work ICT users, then social workers, in turn, need to become more skilled in understanding and using ICT. Hartswood and colleagues argue that this happens naturally as a by-product of the co-realisation process that they envisage, particularly during the implementation phase, as users gain experience of the system.

As users become ‘experienced’ they develop new ways of using the system that in turn generate new ideas for its further development. Rather than users simply adapting themselves to the new system, co-realisation stresses a change not only in the user, but also in their use of the system as a set of working practices evolve through use. Furthermore, we would argue that through this process users gain more general IT competences and become better able to judge inter alia what is possible and what is not, what is simple and what takes time. (Hartswood et al., 2002: 24)

During the period we were writing this book, criticism of one UK government-led ICT system in social work, the Integrated Children’s System (see Chapters 3 and 4), led to a review and to a commitment to allow continuing local development, in line with local needs. What is still missing from policy is a commitment to bring ICT professionals and social work users of ICT closer together in a long term engagement. Such a development has the potential to lead to ICT systems that are configured by best social work practices and ‘owned’ by social workers, rather than continuing to have social work practice configured to meet the needs of ICT systems.

Service users and ICT infrastructure

The discussion so far about working together on creating ICT infrastructure for social work has been about the relationship between ICT professionals and social workers. Yet in recent years social work has begun to understand the value of listening to what service users have to say – not just about their own situations, but about wider issues in the shaping and delivery of social work services. Crucially, the organisation in England and Wales that is dedicated to supporting best practice in social work, the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), argues that there is a central role in its work for people who use services (Social Care Institute for Excellence, 2010). Yet we should acknowledge that developing such a role is a complex task, not least because a significant proportion of ‘users’ of statutory services are ‘involuntary’ (up to a third in some studies) (Ferguson, 2005) and that special skills may be required for working in statutory contexts where ‘service users’ may resist attempts to control their behaviour and to get them to change (Hill, 2010).

So, given the current lack of involvement of social workers, and the complexity of involving service users, is it sensible to suggest that best practice in the design of social work ICT infrastructure should include both groups? The key argument is that the ‘data’ under discussion is directly or indirectly about service users and, despite the complex dynamics of statutory settings, service users have rights not only to access their data but also to have a say in how it is created, managed and shared with others. In our view there is an opportunity here to extend the kind of best practice with service users that has been championed by SCIE into the vexed area of ICT infrastructure.

Consent, confidentiality, privacy and data security

The increasing use of ICTs in social work raises some new questions in relation to consent, confidentiality, privacy and data security. However, in considering them we should be led by the relevant, local legal requirements and by the values and ethics of the profession, rather than by the logic of the ICTs themselves. Social workers have codes of ethics (for the UK see BASW, 2002; for the US see NASW, 2008); and internationally see IFSW, 2005). Whilst these codes do not specifically highlight the use of ICTs, nonetheless we argue in Chapter 3 that these ethical principles should be used to guide best practice in the new contexts brought about by new uses of ICTs. In the US, the National Association of Social Workers has issued Standards for Technology and Social Work Practice (NASW, 2005) and we draw on that helpful document in what follows.

Best practice means that consent to a social work intervention which involves the use of ICT is required unless the service user lacks the capacity to give it, or the intervention has a legal mandate that overrides their wishes. This means that full information about data collection, storage and sharing systems should be provided for all service users as a part of giving information about the social work service. Most work will be carried out on the basis of informed consent, including consent to the use of ICT systems, but the choices of some ‘involuntary’ service users may be restricted by the legal mandate.

Various ethical dilemmas become apparent as we try to define the limits of confidentiality in modern social work. The primary right of service users to privacy means that securing the confidentiality of personal records remains the formal default position in all legal jurisdictions t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Best Practice for Social Work and ICT
• 2 ICT Use in Social Work
• 3 Service Users, Carers and ICT
• 4 Technology and Professional Practice
• 5 ICT and Social Work Agencies
• 6 Social Work Programmes in the Virtual World
• 7 ICT and Practice Based Learning
• References
• Index