Practice Learning and Assessment on BSc (Hons) Social Work: ‘Service User Conversations’

What matters to users of services? An explorative study to promote shared decision making in health care

“…As with other studies 3,8,9 important learning from the project was that of the participants: both professionals and users reported significant personal development and increased capacity for partnership. The following are examples of comments which occurred as a result of reflecting on the project during the writing of this article;…”

“…There is a growing body of work involving service users and carers in the design and conduct of student assessments. The majority of this work has focused upon single disciplines or areas of practice, for example, mental health 1–5 social work 6–8 and podiatry 9 . Rather than identifying a specific clinical area or professional group, this study focused upon a skill considered important to them all.…”

“…User and carer involvement should be supported by a systematic process that includes involvement from the initial stages, from the identification of common competences for practice, to formulation of an assessment tool and ultimately participation in the assessment process. Recent work has included the involvement of service users in the process of assessment of students’ clinical competence 2,4,5,7–9 . A general finding from these studies is that involvement is important but that further work needs to be undertaken to understand the complex factors impacting on the process.…”

'My Expectations Remain the Same. The Student Has to Be Competent to Practise': Practice Assessor Perspectives on the New Social Work Degree Qualification in England

“…This raises the risk of dissonance between more progressive educational curricula and more conservative practices in agencies (Lewis and Bolzan, 2007), and highlights the benefits of systems that support greater involvement of people using services and carers in practice learning (e.g. Elliott et al, 2005).…”

“…Although the evaluation was a multi-method study, by concentrating solely upon a single data source, we are able to report in more depth and include information not reported elsewhere. The article comes at an important transitional time at which a body of evidence on the changes to practice learning following implementation of the social work degree is emerging (Doel et al, 2004;Elliott et al, 2005) but the effects of the new post-qualifying framework (General Social Care Council, 2005) on practice education have yet to emerge. It highlights some of the continuities and differences in practice assessors' roles and concludes that strategies aimed at improving practice learning need to give greater recognition to the impact of their dual roles of practice assessor and agency-based professional.…”