SOCIAL WORK

Social Work

Partnership in Social Work

Introduction

It is quite important for any social work that a proper strategy should be created. The reason is that it makes easier for the participants in formulating a well defined road map for their work. This strategy is equally important for partnership and unorthodox approach because the objective is same. The only difference is that, in the partnership approach, youth members provide assistance to themselves while performing the tasks for social work. However, in the case of individual, the whole task needs to be performed by one person, which clearly becomes, a challenge in this regard. The case, based on a scenario, where the group of youths is disrupting the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. They have involvement in criminal activities like gang fight and drug abuse. The task for various people belonging to different profession is to discuss issues in relation to the neighbourhood and find solutions to the problems related to criminal activities of youth. The members that would meet are Police Community Support Officer (PCSO), Connections advisor, Family support worker, Social worker assistant, Drug and Alcohol counsellor and the undergraduate student. Therefore, all issues in relation to an appropriate social approach adopted by these members will be discussed in detail.

Main Body

Partnership working has become of increasing importance in the delivery of public services in the UK, and, as a consequence, there is a renewed interest in definitions. Back in 1998 the Audit Commission suggested that partnership working was a slippery concept, and, since then there have been a large number of attempts to define partnership working. One of the most accepted definitions, supplied by the Audit Commission categorise collaborative relationships from networks through partnerships, federations and finally mergers. The researcher notes proliferation of related terms including joint working, inter-agency or multi-disciplinary working. Partnership working has a long history in the UK. Researchers in 2001 mentioned the adoption of partnership initiatives to address deprivation in areas, such as the urban programme, and, community development projects that began in the 1960s. Some awareness of the potential for partnership working continued with an Audit Commission report in 1989, which was highly critical of the piecemeal approach of the Thatcher government to regeneration and the deliberate exclusion of local government (Biggam, 1997, 230).

Partnership working, seen to have a number of useful features, which include improving, service delivery for people requiring multiple, and, repeated services. The other aspect is improving the productive use of scarce resources; a means for service managers to share the responsibility of providing public services; and, reducing the organizational stress associated with increased demand for public services combined with a tight fiscal climate. The use of partnership working for the delivery of public services has greatly expanded, and, has become considerably more important in recent years have developed theories related to reasons for the expansion of partnership working. This begins with the notion that, in the 1980s and 1990s, state became overloaded and that its capacity to address issues that ...