Residential social care work Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Residential social care work - Essay Example â€Å"The aim of social work is to enhance citizens’ ability to take care of themselves and to promote their participation in the social process. This can vary from helping one client to get a secure income, or organizing material security to providing information and organizing a social network. It can also mean that the social worker, reviewing her clients’ affairs, comes to the conclusion that there is something structurally amiss at the workplace and that something must fundamentally change in the company’s organization if systematic absenteeism is to be further prevented. The aim is always to help clients to help themselves, to develop new prospects for the future or to simply accept a reality that is difficult to alter.† (p. 141) In order for a social worker to be successful in her career, her broad knowledge of various organizational and networking systems that provide support and services to their clients must be matched with her own vast understanding of how a person’s mind and emotions operate especially in times of crisis. Most of the time, counseling sessions are conducted with her client, or members of her client’s family. Here, the social worker’s communication skills are put to the test. â€Å"In conversations with the professional, clients speak out about their pains and sorrows, and about their hope and beliefs.† (Van Nijnatten, 2006, p.133) It becomes an avenue where both the social worker and the client brainstorm on ways to express these emotions so they construct new meanings and new perspectives. Coming from an objective frame of mind, the social worker helps the client distance himself to the concern at hand and explains that such overwhelming emotions that the cl ient is undergoing are normal and can cite cases of others who have survived through the same. Then ways to resolve the problem are discussed. With children, social workers take on a more critical role, as they adjust