Suchergebnisse

Partnership Care West is a voluntary organisation that contracts with the Northern Ireland Social Care Council (NISCC) to provide ten placements for social work students. NISCC is a statutory organisation, with responsibility for registering and regulating social care/work, improving standards in education and training and standardising practice in Northern Ireland NISCC (2003).The students attend the practice learning centre and are then given placements in voluntary sector sites established by the centre. Traditionally, the students were supervised on a one to one basis using the long arm approach. In recent years however, the centre has developed a model for supervising these students in groups.Building on my positive experience of conducting group supervision and to further my knowledge, skills and values in this area, I recently undertook an international comparison with the School of Social Work in Haifa Israel. This School has an already well established model for supervising students in groups and I hoped that I could learn something to help me develop my model further. I would like to thank Nava Arkin at the University of Haifa for her willingness to take part in this comparison and for her encouragement throughout. This article aims to outline my findings of the comparison and outline the theoretical constructs that make international comparisons in social work possible.

This article outlines my attempt to create a small scale project, with the aim of involving citizens in the education of student social workers whilst on their placement in Northern Ireland. The article outlines the literature on the subject, describes how the project evolved and discusses how citizens were involved in the direct teaching process. The article continues by describing how the teaching input of the citizens was then transferred into educating five students. The article evaluates the educational impact on the students and discusses the value of involving citizens in the education process during placement. This project was part of my dissertation for my Joint Advanced MSc in Social Work, presented to The University of Ulster and Queens University Belfast.

Much is written about group supervision in other health care fields; however less attention is paid to this topic in social work. This lack of scholarly attention became obvious to the author when he attempted to begin supervising students in groups and was unable to reference a suitable model or template of group supervision from which to gain ideas or direction. The author therefore decided to develop his own model of group supervision. The following article gives an account of how the author developed this model by critically appraising the relevant policy and theory from a local and national perspective to inform his practice.

Abstract
Systematic literature reviews are crucial in research. Identifying relevant research is the first stage in a systematic review, yet challenges exist hindering their efficacy. Through a case study search strategy addressing the question 'What do we know about children's participation in child welfare decision-making?', this article seeks to promote efficiency in searching by building on existing conceptual and practical guidelines for conducting systematic literature searches and appraisal of database performance in social work research. Thirteen databases were utilised in this study. The total citations, unique hits, sensitivity and precision for each database were calculated to gauge database performance before conducting a cross-study comparison with five previously published social work systematic reviews to begin recognising emergent themes. Social Science Citation and PsycINFO are effective high-performing databases in social work. Social Services Abstracts, Applied Social Science Index and Abstracts are also recommended. The article emphasises the pitfalls of relying on a single database, highlighting the importance of comprehensive searches to avoid bias and increase relevance. The findings underscore the need for social work professionals to develop effective database searching skills, leveraging the information age to inform and enhance practice, promoting efficiency and addressing the challenges faced in this critical stage of research.

Abstract
The objective of this research was to conduct a systematic review of systematic reviews related to Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) as it relates to children and young people involved with child welfare agencies. This systematic review sought to comply with the guidance from the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis on umbrella reviews. Fourteen databases were searched using predefined terms. Six hundred seventy-four original hits were retrieved for title and abstract searching after independent searching by the authors. Of those, fourteen were included for full independent reads and all fourteen were selected after discussion. Each systematic review was appraised using an eleven-point quality checklist from JBI. A thematic review was conducted to ascertain the themes across all systematic reviews. Three themes emerged (i) children's voice is not taken seriously; (ii) relationships are an important determining factor in (un)successful participation; and (iii) the context of participation is important. Our conclusion is that despite mandated UNCRC requirements to involve children and young people within the child protection system, the possibilities for children and young people to express their views remain restricted.