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As It Deals With So Many Issues, Social Work Delivery Has To Necessarily ...

As it deals with so many issues, social work delivery has to necessarily happen in many different settings, including hospitals or health centres, educational or community settings, training centres, prisons, secure homes, advice centres, or even in people's own homes. Social work practice and delivery, during the era of the welfare state owed its form and shape to the vision and concepts of Frederic Seebohm, who, in 1968, published the report that led to the formation of social services departments and decided the route of social work in the UK. The Seebohm committee looked at social work being delivered in the welfare state through unified social services departments, staffed by a complementary mix of bureaucrats, who would be in charge of administrative responsibilities, and professional social workers, whose responsibilities would encompass direct interaction with the community and delivery of services in required areas. The Seebohm report led to the enactment of the Local Authority Social Services Act, 1970 and consequently to the creation of Social Service Departments in all local authorities with the mandate to deliver service in their demarcated areas.
The early years of the experiment saw enormous enthusiasm and idealism on the part of social service workers, and involved significant governmental spending, (which increased at 10 % every year), on ensuring a co-ordinated and wide-ranging approach to the troubles of individuals, families and their communities. Prevention, partnership, the role of the voluntary sector and the importance of harnessing the strengths of communities were given emphasis.
The Seebohm approach was however generic in nature, a style that the new departments found difficult to implement. Seebohm was definite in his opposition to the thought of separating social care, either by client age group or discipline, stating that such an approach disturbed stability of care to families and split the profession in precisely the way that the separate children's and welfare departments, which had existed until then, had done. The new service would, by contrast, be family-centred rather than "symptom-centred". Since the aim of departments was to "meet all the social needs of the family or individual together and as a whole", the committee maintained that these needs should be served as far as possible by a single social worker. (Parrott, 2002)
Even as the concept of generic, family based departments had many positives, it was also constrained by the lack of specialist knowledge and asked too much of individual social workers. While the idea was a reaction to the fragmentation of the 1960s, it resulted in excessive demands on individual workers who were required to work with all age groups and cater to all needs.

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