Mental Health Social Workers Delivery of Family Focused Practice
A quarter of patients accessing support from adult mental health services are parents of dependent children but, in England, care rarely identifies parenthood status or provides targeted support. While mental health social workers (MHSWs) are ideally positioned to deliver family focused practice, they report that there is a lack of organisational support for this approach. The aim of this workshop is to develop guidelines for the delivery of family focused practice by MHSWs, drawing on best practice from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland where this approach has been successfully implemented.
Family-focused practice in mental health services is known to improve outcomes for patients and their families. However, we also know it is not currently embedded in services. The confidence and competence of clinical staff is one recognised barrier to family focused practice. Mental health social workers (MHSWs) identify that their values and training make them particularly suitable to deliver and promote family focused practice in these services. To bridge the gap between MHSWs stated desire to engage in family focused practice, and their current delivery of it, there is a need for clear practice guidelines, developed in partnership with clinical, academic, managerial and commissioning stakeholders. The objective of this workshop is to develop these guidelines.
The workshop will run over one afternoon and be organized into two sections:
1) Knowledge exchange: Learning from Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland where MHSW’s are instrumental in delivery of family focused practice as well as new data on MHSW practice from the University of Surrey and presentations from practitioners and social work researchers on the role, responsibility and clinical context.
2) Guideline development: We will then utilize a consensus building technique in which an interactive rounds of discussion and feedback will seek to develop guidelines for the delivery of family-focused practice by MHSWs. Following the seminar, the next step will be to use the generated outputs to develop a funding application to pilot the guidelines.