Service User Perspectives: Assessing care needs
Learning objectives
Having watched these videos, you should understand the importance of taking a strengths-based approach to assessment and recognize the different factors that can help or enable individuals to manage challenges, meet their needs and achieve their desired outcomes.
Personalised approaches to care underpin social work with adults and require social workers help enable people have more direct role in the design and delivery of their support. In these videos, Sophie, a university student with ataxic cerebral palsy, discusses the process of being assessed for residential care with Sally, a social work lecturer with experience of adult social work services. Sophie describes having to argue for the service to meet her needs and, together, they consider what independence really means.
You can read more about Sophie’s experiences in A Guide to Statutory Social Work Interventions: The Lived Experience. Find out more about it by following this link.
Part A - Benefits of a care home
Part B - Specific needs and wellbeing
Part C - Independent living and developing confidence
Part - D Message to social workers
Reflective Questions
1. Why do you think it was so important to Sophie that she be able to live in residential care? Why do you feel her social workers were reluctant to support this decision?
2. Independently or in a small group, consider how Sophie’s story raises questions about the notions of “Independence” and “Risk”. For example, is it a person’s disability that creates risk or society’s response to it? What do you understand independence to be? Is about self-sufficiency or self-determination?
3. Sophie’s story highlights some of the potential conflicts and difficulties that can be experienced in social work with adults. It also illustrates the opportunities getting it right can open up. What are the key messages you take away from this?