Social Work Practice with Adults
Learning from Lived Experience
- Sally Lee - Bournemouth University, UK
- Louise Oliver - Bournemouth University, UK
Since launching in 2003, Transforming Social Work Practice has become the market-leading series for social work students. These books use activities and case studies to build critical thinking and reflection skills and will help social work students to develop good practice through learning.
These books are:
· Affordable
· Written to the Professional Capabilities Framework
· Mapped to the social work curriculum
· Practical with clear links between theory and practice
This book gives some really thought-provoking views from people with lived experience, and suggests some excellent exercises or thought experiments for students to complete.
For future editions, the authors might think about the inclusion of work with deaf-blind individuals (given that this is specifically mandated in the Care Act 2014), and also give a little more balance between personal perspectives and legislation - the chapter on the Mental Capacity Act seemed out of place as compared to material on mental health. I also felt that it was not immediately clear to the reader that a person cannot 'lack capacity' in the round, but that it is indeed decision and time specific.
The book offers an innovative approach to exploring social work practice with adults, by amplifying the voice of lived experience throughout. Inclusion of a chapter on decision-making as a key theme in adult social work was very welcome, as a was a chapter on disabled adults, often overlooked. Nevertheless, a weakness of the text is its neglect of sensory impairment mentioned only once in the entire text. This is a group often marginalised in social work literature.
