The rise of social care ‘e-services’

Digital communication is playing an increasing role in the lives of social workers but, along with opportunities to share best practice and reach service users, professionals need to be aware of the pitfalls

Social work is moving online, as new technology offers innovative ways of delivering training and services. But the transition involves challenges and potential risks.

Digital communication and social media provide new ways of connecting professionals with each other, and with their clients, while recent years have seen the introduction of “e-services”, where support and information is available online. For example, Swedish teenagers with a question about drugs or alcohol can turn to a website for instant answers and in Belgium, online “chat help” is offered to people with queries and concerns about healthcare issues.

The Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development, hosted in Sweden, heard how digital communication is playing an increasing role in professionals’ working lives. As the co-founder of Skype is Swedish, and half of Sweden’s adult population are said to be signed up to Facebook, a similiar percentage as the UK, the use of social media by students and professionals seemed an appropriate topic for the conference.

The conference discussed how the city of Stockholm has been studying how its social workers use the internet and digital communication. The study found social workers used the internet and mobile technology for information, research and communication while virtually all used email to contact their clients, with mobile phone calls and text messaging also commonplace. But Johanna Löfvenius, who led the study, said social workers were often concerned about whether this kind of contact was an appropriate way to relay sensitive information.

“Social workers are reluctant to share too much information through the internet or cell phones,” said Löfvenius. “They want to know, can they send sensitive information? One said, ‘We always try to refer sensitive conversations to real life [in person]’.”

Online research

Professionals working in youth outreach, whose clients have woven social media into their day-to-day lives, were the most likely to use Facebook or instant messaging to engage with service users, the study found. Social workers were also using the internet to search for information about their clients, said Löfvenius, although this raised questions about whether the results were “authentic and absolutely true”.

Many of those who took part in the study said they wanted more information on technology and the law; they had concerns about who “owns” information shared via a third party site, such as Facebook, and they wanted guidelines on how to use the internet as a tool.

Meanwhile, the question was asked, do clients search for information about their social workers?

Sue Watling, learning and teaching co-ordinator at the University of Lincoln, warned that social work students should be reminded of their “digital footprints”. Careless or inappropriate comments made online could go viral, she said, and in some circumstances could wreck careers. She suggested that digital literacy should be made part of the first-year curriculum at universities.

Social media use can have unexpected and potentially threatening consequences for care professionals, according to Tara La Rose, of the University of Toronto.

She told how a US foster family filmed a home visit by a child protection worker who they claimed was responsible for splitting up the siblings they intended to adopt. The film, which named the child protection professional, was posted on YouTube, has been viewed nearly 40,000 times and has received almost 400 comments – mostly hate speech aimed either at the child protection system or directly at the professional shown in the film.

La Rose said that while social media offered opportunities for self-advocacy, the couple’s film “created an environment that fostered hate” and raised occupational health and safety issues for workers. Unions and professional organisations should look at how the rights of clients, workers and employers should be balanced in the digital age.

As well as offering social workers new ways to connect with service users, digital media can bring students, academics and frontline professionals together. Since 2005, a consortium of European universities has been running a “virtual campus” for social work, offering online courses. The SW VirCamp is now used by students in Africa and Russia, as well as from around Europe. It is planning a course in online help, which will look at how social media can be used to deliver services to clients.

Social media is also connecting the next generation of social workers around the world.

A project launched at the first Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development, held in 2010 in Hong Kong, helped students learn about the global context of social work. Known as the Six-Continents Project, it linked social work classroom in the US, the West Indies, Tobago, Hong Kong, Australia, Sweden and Lesotho.

The students recorded videos in which they responded to a set of questions on topics such as social problems in their region and what diversity means in their area. Their responses were uploaded to the Six-Continents webpage, where students could see all the videos and then make their own video responses to each other’s answers.

For the past four years, social work students in the US and Germany have used Skype to connect with each other, as a way of “internationalising” the curriculum.

Claudia Megele, a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, told the Stockholm conference how a social work Twitter thread had become an “online community of practice”, aiming to bridge the gaps between theory, research and practice.

Social work and social media would also, from September, be incorporated into the curriculum at a number of selected universities, Megele announced. “People who use digital media want to be co-producers of information,” she said.