Overcoming barriers to effective planning
Learning Objectives
After considering this resource, you should better understand some of the barriers to planning which you may come up against, and how these can be overcome.
Planning should be an integral part of the social work process. Being aware of potential barriers to this stage in advance can help you to overcome difficulties, or even prevent one from arising in the first place.
In this quick guide, Sarah Leigh discusses various barriers you may encounter in planning your work, and how these might be overcome to ensure an effective planning stage.
Reflective Questions
- If you feel your planning is delayed, what reasons can you identify that might be causing this?
- You feel really nervous with one of your service users. It's stopping you getting on with your assessment planning. Write down what you need to do to help you to feel safe with this person, critically reflect on why you feel unsafe and how this might be solved.
- When your agency feels disrupted and stressed, what can you do to ensure your planning is effective and your tasks are getting done on time?
- If other professionals seem to be interrupting your own work in planning assessments and interventions, reflect on how you will deal with this. Note three things you might do to take to your next supervision session.
- Service users are not attending a lot of appointments and you need to get on with planning the next stage of the assessments. You feel frustrated. What will you reflect on to prepare for your next supervision session?