CRCF Seminar Resources

The presentation focussed on the main challenges associated with the organization and financing of long-term care for dependent elderly people in Poland. The problem addressed is not specific to Poland, but concerns most societies in European countries. For years, there has been an increase in the demand for care services implemented in the form of inpatient and community care. On the other hand, the caring potential of families is changing and the cost of care provided by professional caregivers is increasing. The indicated problem poses a serious challenge for the social welfare sector, including mainly social workers. Because it is the social welfare sector, which reports directly to municipalities, that is responsible for organizing and co-financing long-term care services. Solutions in Poland will be presented, and there was space for discussion on the search for solutions to problems that also occur in the UK.

 

Rafał Iwański - PhD in economics, sociologist – social worker. Assistant professor at the Department of Social Pedagogy of the University of Szczecin. Graduate from the University of Economics in Poznań and the University of Szczecin. Vice-Chairman of the Polish Gerontological Society. Secretary International Society for Research on Solitude (ISRS).Author of the books "Long-term care for the elderly" and "Palliative and hospice care in economic and social terms." Editor of the book "Silver Economy - an interdisciplinary approach". Author of numerous articles and chapters on long-term care, social work and gerontological economics.

Anna Szafranek – PhD in Sociology, specialisation: Social Gerontology, adjunct in the Department of Strategy Management, Faculty of Management at University of Białystok member of the Polish research group within three international projects DAPHNE III covering the topic of violence towards elderly women, author/co-author of numerous publications in the field of gerontology, laureate in two contests organized by Polish Gerontological Society for the best master degree thesis and PhD thesis in the field of gerontology and geriatric. Find out more.

Mothers who have their children enter care often have complex health and healthcare needs. Many of the challenges faced by women are the product of lifelong disadvantages, and can be compounded by adverse social circumstances, such as low social support and living in poverty. We also know that child removal via children’s social care can trigger deteriorating health, including mental health difficulties, poor antenatal health for subsequent pregnancies, and even avoidable mortality. This presentation will share findings from qualitative interviews with mothers, a national survey of perinatal professionals, epidemiological analyses of administrative health data, and a systematic scoping review of evidence. We aim to illustrate ways in which health and social care might do better at supporting mothers often ‘left behind’ by children’s social care.

 

Claire is a PhD student in Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. Her research focuses on understanding the life course needs and experiences of mothers who have children removed from their care. She has a background in psychology and mental health, and experience working across NHS, charity, and university settings. Her research uses data from administrative health records, surveys, and qualitative interviews to generate ideas around what principles underpin meaningful healthcare for these women.

Experiences of moral distress are a significant risk of burnout among child protection workers. This presentation will examine the experiences of moral distress among child protection professionals and the organisational factors behind these experiences. The session will include suggestions for promoting the ability of the workers to do child protection work in an ethically sustainable way in the current challenging context.

Maija Mänttäri-van der Kuip (DSocSci), is a university lecturer in social work at the university of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland. Her research interests include the capabilities and wellbeing of social workers and the experiences of ethical strain among them.
 

Child and family social work - in particular, child protection - has been identified as an inherently emotionally demanding area of practice. The longstanding impact of such working conditions have been associated with staff burnout and ongoing recruitment and retention issues. How these demands are managed therefore has important implications for children and families in need of support, workforce wellbeing, social work organisations and the wider social work profession. Teams are identified as the primary organisational structure for social work practice and a key site for professional learning and support. However, whilst the team can function as a secure base and offer containment, it can also paradoxically be a place of emotional insecurity.  

This article draws on a hybrid ethnography of two child and family social work teams in England during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings indicated that in addition to managing emotions, students, social workers, and those in supervisory positions within the team also needed to perform emotions in a way that was compatible with the expectations of their professional role. Through the trifocal lens of emotional labour (Grandey 2013, Hochschild 1983) and the dramaturgical metaphor of Setting, Roles, and Scripts (Goffman 1959), a novel conceptual framework of how team support is constructed in practice is presented.

Shared residence is one way that parents can reorganise their family after separation or divorce, with some children experiencing a 50-50 split of time between the two households. Predominantly, research in this area is focussed on outcomes for children and tends to be from Scandinavian countries and Australia. This seminar presents findings from PhD research carried out by Jen Coleman at the University of East Anglia which sought to prioritise the voices of young people in increasing our understanding of what it is like to experience living in this way.

Ruth Copson, a postgraduate researcher at UEA, shared her early findings from her qualitative research which explored how Family Time for infants in Early Permanence (EP) placements is managed, understood and experienced  by key people involved – birth parents, EP carers, contact workers, social workers and the baby themselves.  

Early Permanence, where a child is temporarily fostered by prospective adopters who may go on to adopt them, is a unique route to adoption with many emotional challenges for both carers and birth parents who experience significant uncertainty. Family Time, where  parents spend time with their child in a supervised setting, involves parents and carers communicating with each other, often meeting face-to-face. How parents and carers navigate their relationships and parental identity will be discussed, as well as highlighting the role of the Family Time worker and exploring the perceived purposes of Family Time. Consideration will also be given to the experience of the infant, at the heart of these Family Time plans.   

Findings were fed into social work theory and practice, informing the development of tools for observing and supervising Family Time. Suggestions were provided on the management of Family Time in EP placements, and guidance was offered on preparation of prospective adopters and support for birth parents. 

The topic of the survey is devoted to various issues referred to the family as a social group and social institution, exploring the tendencies of significant changes in Ukrainian families which appear during the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022-2023. We discussed family composition, household changes, shifts in values and in distributing family roles and responsibilities among three different groups of women who have had families at the start of the war in February 2022. Comparing the results among our audiences, we can affirm that the life circumstances that we have defined for group targeting are significant and bring the substantial differences to their answers.

Biography
Dr Olga Sovenko joined UEA as a Research Fellow under the British Academy grant in 2023, been honorary lecturer in AMA school since 2022. She also works in Kyiv (Ukraine) as a lecturer and a scientist at theoretical and empirical level of Sociology and Media studies. Her main interests are:
•    gender studies, 
•    media studies,
•    socio-cultural analysis (values, meanings, norms and practices).
Olga has been a manager, methodologist and coordinator of the local and international research projects in Ukraine in cooperation with such organisations as Internews-Network, UNDP, GIZ and others.

This presentation explored how social workers assess and manage risk and uncertainty when doing adult safeguarding work.  Using the concept of ‘risk-work’, developed by Brown and Gale, the presentation showed how referrals and assessments were managed by social workers in three local authorities in England.  The presentation described two intervention models used by the local authorities.  The way in which information and communication technology systems were used is also identified, showing that these systems were used both to retrieve risk knowledge and to organise interventions.  The presentation demonstrated how professional discretion and team cultures were used to supplement or override existing systems where tensions between professional values existed.  Finally, the presentation highlighted how social relations between social workers and other professional groups were managed when conducting safeguarding enquiries. It highlighted a dominant concern about ‘inappropriate referrals’ amongst social workers and reports a divergence of opinion as to whether local authorities should be encouraging or discouraging agencies to highlight safeguarding concerns.  

Biography
Dr Jeremy Dixon is a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Bath.  He joined the University of Bath in 2012 having worked for three years as a senior lecturer in social work at the University of the West of England before that.  
Jeremy qualified as a social worker in 1998 and worked in a wide variety of mental health services in statutory and voluntary sectors.  This included work in community mental health teams, drug and alcohol teams and work in forensic mental health settings.  

He has several research interests.  These include: 
•    The views of people with mental health problems on their own mental health care
•    The views of carers towards mental health care
•    How professionals interpret law and policy

Jeremy is the president of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Mental Health and Illness.  He is also the co-director of the Centre for Death & Society at the University of Bath, is a board member of the journal Health, Risk & Society and is vice chair of the Health Research Authority’s Social Care Ethics Committee.