Service users and social work

While social work reflects a rich diversity of practice globally it shares one important characteristic – its daily encounters with some of the most impoverished casualties of unequal societies. Whatever issues service users bring to these encounters, the impact of structural inequalities on their health chances as well as health experiences are evident. As older people, parents and children living in poverty, people with HIV/AIDS, disabilities, mental health problems and learning difficulties they struggle with the scarce resources they have at their disposal to fully realise their well-being and citizenship.

The personal troubles that service users share with social workers are public issues. The emotional and physical distress and ill-health they experience reflect the political, social and economic decisions being taken in the societies in which they live; societies in which they exercise little formal power and occupy marginal or excluded positions.

Social work has always been a profession positioned between the mainstream and the margins of society. It works with the complexity and unpredictability of the human condition. At the same time it is mandated by state agencies to deliver on national social policy agendas. As Lorenz suggests the challenge for social work is how to practise ‘between system and lifeworld’ and not to be ‘incorporated into public systems of social policy and national policies of social and cultural systems of integration’ (Lorenz, 2004, p 147).

This challenge is relevant to social work practitioners in service, education and research environments. Put at its simplest: do we accept the status quo and work within the constraints and injustices of the world we find ourselves in? Or do we take seriously the global definition of social work of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and strive to promote social change through our belief that the principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work (IASSW/IFSW, 2004)?