Whiting & Birch (E-Journals)
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Gather the Women
Get PDFGather the Women (GTW) is a program for women with limited financial resources that includes groupwork and is designed to guide participants toward economic advancement and personal growth. The participants were interviewed to understand more about their perspectives of the group and how it has affected them. This article presents an overview of the program, a description of each woman in her own words and identifies several themes regarding reasons for joining the group, group norms, relationships, future outlook and program factors. Results indicate that the group has improved their trust in other women, self-confidence, self-esteem and views of the future. These outcomes may contribute to an overall sense of empowerment and are necessary for working on their goals for economic advancement
Ladies’ Water Aerobics Swim Group
Get PDFOver the course of the past year (2012-2013), the author has been swimming at his local YMCA (Y). Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday he observed a group of between 10-12 women participating in an aerobics swim group. It gradually dawned on him that this was a recreational, activity support group. What impressed him was the way the women interacted with one another; they were always talking, laughing and clearly enjoying one another’s company. In June of this year, the author decided to approach one of the members of the group and see if she would be willing to share some of her experiences of attending the group. This resulted in her speaking and e-mailing all of the women, who in turn e-mailed and spoke to the author about their reasons for participating in and the benefits they derived from the group. The paper incorporates the narratives of the women regarding the reasons for joining and also the numerous, physical, psychological, emotional, mental health, and social benefits of the group. The author also provides the reader with a number of theoretical concepts from groupwork literature, which further reinforce the numerous benefits of the Ladies’ Aerobic Swim Group
‘Being a useful puppet’ A study of municipal medication-assisted rehabilitation in Norway
Get PDFThe issue addressed by this study is informed by the experiences of employees in community services in medication-assisted rehabilitation (MAR) in relation to current practices. The study was carried out in a Norwegian municipality with 53,000 inhabitants. An electronic questionnaire with multiple choice answers and options for freetext responses was issued to 11 municipal employees and 13 general practitioners (GPs). The municipal employees perceive the current MAR system as deficient. The diversity of the patients gives rise to great variation in professional experience. Cooperation and follow-up is to a very great extent dependent on the individual concerned. The respondents also state that the medical aspect of MAR work has become overly predominant, and call for a more systematic approach to improve common professional understanding, division of responsibility and coordination. The material suggests that each general practitioner attends to too few MAR patients to be able to accumulate sufficient expertise in treatment and care pathways. Current practice, where general practitioners often feel themselves as ‘being useful puppets in the MAR system’, is regarded with relatively high dissatisfaction. Respondents in this Norwegian study assert the need to consider a more centralised form of organisation releasing general practitioners from MAR responsibility. In the analysis, the focus was on how municipal employees and general practitioners interpret MAR. This lead to various reflections and issues of concern arising out of the materials obtained
Mechanisms that support the assessment of interpersonal skills
Get PDFIn many health professions, experienced practitioners assess students’ or inexperienced practitioners’ clinical skills but do not formally or explicitly rate their interpersonal skills, even though it is often suggested that failing or struggling students have poor interpersonal skills. The Interpersonal Skills Profile (ISP) has been widely used in UK health care programmes. The tool allows assessors to select five statements from a list, which they feel reflect the student’s achievement. These are usually graded from fail to excellent.Using a Realistic Evaluation approach this study examined how the ISP was used to assess interpersonal skills in a university pre-registration nursing programme. The use of the ISP was investigated through interviews with clinical nursing mentors, practice education facilitators and education champions as well as a documentary analysis of student assessment booklets. The findings led to the development of three middle range theories which may be useful in other contexts. These focus on: 1) overt assessment of interpersonal skills, 2) providing support to mentors and 3) feedback and ‘feeding-forward’ to students
The National Troubled Families Programme
Get PDFThis article describes the Government’s Troubled Families national programme setting out its aims to ‘turn around’ 120,000 families who have multiple problems. The eligibility criteria for the programme cover families involved in youth crime or anti-social behaviour; having children who are regularly truanting or not in school; an adult on out-of-work benefits, or otherwise are of high costs to the local authority. However for most of these families, such problems are elements in a complex picture where many other issues are at play. A representation is depicted of families who have multiple problems where there is no ‘single stand-out’ root cause. A holistic approach has evolved towards family intervention as it is claimed that to date problems have been treated in isolation resulting in services lacking a systematic approach. Some of the thinking behind this programme is laid out as are proffered solutions. Usually the Troubled Families approach employs one worker or team taking responsibility to enable a process of engagement to secure rapport, trust and participation in an agency intervention, introducing stability and consistency into the family home. The programme is to be expanded beyond 2015 to work with a larger number of families over a five-year period
Impact of the Integrated Food and Nutrition Programme in Kungwini, South Africa
Get PDFThis article discusses the impact of the Integrated Food and Nutrition Programme (IFNP) in light of collaborative partnerships for poverty reduction in a developing municipal area in South Africa. The programme aimed to develop home, community and school food gardens to meet the daily nutritional needs of poor households and the process was then to be broadened into marketing surplus garden produce, providing employment and income-generating opportunities. The programme thus aimed to address more than just basic food and nutrition. The purpose of the research was to obtain data through participant observation, focus group discussions and extended household interviews. Drawing on the qualitative interviews conducted with the beneficiaries of the IFNP, the article describes the manner in which poverty can continue to entrench the social exclusion of the poor (despite a specific policy intervention to improve their circumstances) when appropriate stakeholder collaboration is not fully developed and harnessed. The research recommendations include improving weak institutional environments, which may hinder effective service delivery, identifying appropriate skills development for the poor, ensuring community involvement in policy processes, maintaining efficient communication in collaborative partnerships, and maintaining personnel training on policy development and in project management skills
Learning communities
Get PDFLearning communities are becoming increasingly common as a means of assisting incoming students with their transition to college. They have been shown to improve student retention, academic performance, and student-faculty relationships. Learning communities are prime examples of groupwork in action, and can provide opportunities for educators to teach and model social groupwork concepts and principles. This paper 1) defines and describes learning communities, 2) discusses the theoretical basis for the application of groupwork principles to the learning community experience, and 3) describes and assesses three years of experience with the application of groupwork principles in social work learning communities in an undergraduate university in the Midwestern United States
Use of social media by self-help and mutual aid groups
Get PDFThis paper explores the use of social media by self-help/mutual aid groups that meet on a regular face-to-face basis. It draws on data from the ESTEEM project, which ran from 2010 to 2013 with the overall aim of developing a range of resources for health and social care practitioners on how to support self-help/mutual aid groups. A re-examination of the interviews and discussions that were undertaken with 21 groups in two UK sites indicated that groups’ use of social media was becoming an increasingly important resource. The findings highlight a range of benefits and limitations with selfhelp/mutual aid groups using social media and suggest a blurring of boundaries between online and face-to-face groups. For groupworkers involved with self-help/mutual aid groups opportunities in developing groups’ online presence are raised
Phantoms in the brain
Get PDFUse of mirrors with people with phantom limbs reveals that extraordinary and immediate changes in felt experience can occur when an internal schema in the brain is projected out and then perceived as external. This opens up a fascinating new area of work for group psychotherapy given the discovery of the neurologically embedded social self. Examination of a psychodramatic production of an individual’s internally held social self suggests similar mechanisms are in operation for the updating of the social self schema. It appears that the interpersonal field is a primary factor in the formation of the self and that the corresponding neurobiological structures can be further modified with mirroring of the cognitive, affective and relational aspects of the social self. Understanding these mechanisms will enhance the different techniques of interpersonal mirroring that already occur in most group modalities. Progress will be made as we reflect on the results of putting these new insights and ideas into practice