Health, Welfare and Practice
Reflecting on Roles and Relationships
The book's first three sections explore: the distinctions between health and welfare occupations, and informal helping roles; different approaches for practitioners to develop sensitivity to diverse experiences and to challenge unfairly discriminatory responses, attitudes and stereotyped assumptions; and the potential for user empowerment, given the imbalance in power between workers and users. These areas provide practitioners with sources for reflection in the final section.
This unique collection encompasses both personal accounts and important current debates. It blends research with practice, and experience with academic insight. Throughout, readers are encouraged to make links across occupational divides and to challenge traditional assumptions.
The volume is a Course Reader for the Open University course Roles and Relationships: Perspectives on Practice K663.
`A dazzling variety of articles drawn from almost the entire health and welfare spectrum. The problem is what to read first. Should it be George Orwell's account of death in a Paris hospital in 1929, or GP Tom Heller's memories of the Hillsborough disaster? There is meat for the academically minded alongside telling insights from service users like Anita Binns, a woman with learning disabilities. The emphasis on roles and relationships holds the collection together and frees many of the writers to set aside professional status and use their personal experience to inform the search for better practice. If only the book was likely to be read by all the professional know-it-alls who think they are above their clients' - Health Service Journal
`many nuggets worth mining, and it is a valuable teaching resource.' - Medical Sociology News
`useful because it collects together disparate material in one place ... This book represents the resurgence of role analysis in social work ... One of the assets of the book is its material from both health and social work professions ... this book asserts and demonstrates extremely well and interestingly the value of self-reflection in professional practice' - British Journal of Social Work
`This book has a number of strengths. All of the chapters are brief and well focused ... many of [them] stand as excellent vehicles for stimulating class discussion... I think this book has excellent applicability to the education of students of a variety of health and human service occupations' - Disability Studies Quarterly
`This Open University Reader focuses on reflective practice from a multi-occupational perspective, using roles and relationships as its organising theme. It is written for an audience of trainers, teachers, students and workers to develop practice in health and welfare.... This is a very good reader whose contents provide rich, varied and moving material for health and welfare professionals' - Disability and Society
