Social Work Skills: A Practice Handbook

What skills do social workers need to become effective practitioners? How can these skills be perfected and made transferable across different service user and carer groups, contexts, and countries? How can these skills be used to enhance multi-agency co-operation and collaboration? Written by an experienced academic practitioner, the new edition of this best-selling text is updated to include the current educational policy and practice context of social work. It provides descriptions of over fifty social work skills, with case examples to illustrate their creative use in practice. Giving a name to these skills, and being able to identify and demonstrate their effective use in contemporary social work practice, highlights the importance of an evidence-based an research-led approach to practice. In particular, this edition contains new material on: Social work methods, practice approaches and perspectives. The knowledge base of social work and the importance of the relationship between theory and practice. How the terms skill and intervention are defined and effectively applied in practice. The starting point for this text is that social work is–and has to be a highly skilled activity. It is important to stress this fact because social work practitioners work with some of the most complex, unpredictable and troubling areas of human experience.  For this reason, social work practice is also an intellectual activity. This calls for practitioners to acquire a ‘toolbox’ of skills that can be used to enable people to move forward. Social Work skills is essential reading for all social work students and a valuable reference text for practising social workers and human service professionals.