If you ask social workers why they came into social work many will say "to help people". Yet the Department of Health's personal social services survey on recruitment and retention (March 2002) shows that some field workers in social services departments feel increasingly disillusioned and frustrated by insufficient resources, too little time to spend with service users, too much paperwork and a public all too eager to blame them for failures and not recognise success.

Through the "human givens approach" social workers can meet service users' needs and increase their own job satisfaction. The approach is concerned with the "givens" of human nature - our basic needs and our innate resources for helping us meet them. Its main emphasis is on emotional needs, not just for intimacy, security and self-esteem but for community or connection (beyond the immediate family), autonomy or a degree of control, meaning or purpose, giving and receiving attention and what has been called "flow" - utter absorption in a worthwhile activity.

The approach is so useful to social work because it maintains the focus on helping people. It provides a simple framework for assessing unmet needs and ways to allow people to use their own resources to achieve change quickly.

Young people just taken into care, for instance, may resort to bad behaviour in desperation to have their need for attention met (or, if they have been neglected at home, they may have resorted to this already). If they feel rejected by their family, they may think life has no meaning and search to replace it through negative sources such as promiscuous sex, drugs or alcohol.

When they are suddenly removed from their home into care, they lose the connections they have made in the community. They have little control over what has happened. And talents or interests they previously enjoyed (flow) may somehow fall by the wayside in the transition from home to care.

When this happens, we have to look at meeting their needs by using the individual's resources. The answers don't have to be complicated. In one care home, a young man with mental health problems was discovered to have remarkable gymnastic abilities. That simple discovery has not only led to many of his emotional needs being met, but also a reduction in his psychological difficulties. He started to attend a gymnastics class in the community which instantly widened his horizons beyond the children's unit where he lived. Quite quickly, he was helping the instructor in class, thus meeting his need to give and receive attention. As a result, he had a purpose and sense of control over his life, regardless of what had happened with his family.

Not all young people will have his gifts, but all have some resources if we take the time to find them. Skills and interests I have found to date include poetry, autograph-hunting, break-dancing and acting. I was told of a young man who had removed the floor of the neighbouring flat while the occupant was away and relaid it in his own! You can imagine the difficulties that caused, and how easily the skill he had employed in doing so could be lost instead of used. Of course, he needed to see that his actions were wrong, but his skill could still be recognised and channelled into work or training.

Sometimes social workers have no idea whether the young people they work with have any specific talents; often workers become lost in the crises in the young people's lives that they have to respond to. To redress this we are attempting to analyse the needs of young people leaving care in five local authorities and create Pathway plans for them, based on the Framework for Assessment and the human givens approach.

Simple emphasis on needs and resources can do much to help older people in residential care where, all too often, focus is on meeting people's physical needs, while emotional needs get lost. Dorothy,* a devout 85-year-old Christian, was no longer able to live on her own after a stroke and was admitted to residential care. Here she was fed, sheltered and kept warm, but she felt very low and "useless". She tortured herself with the idea that she must have done something wrong for God to punish her like this.

Using the human givens approach, it was instantly possible for a social worker to reframe this view with the comment "In my experience, God always puts people in places where he has a job for them to do. Perhaps you haven't found your job yet."

The next visit revealed that Dorothy had taken on the role of welcoming new residents to the home and taking them under her wing to settle them in. Suddenly she had purpose and meaning in her life again. This did not take additional social work time and the solution speaks for itself.

The approach can even be used in child protection cases, if a parent's needs can be addressed without detriment to the children. The approach still assesses risks but emphasises the positives and strengths for achieving change.

For instance, Simone,* a single mother, started to neglect her six young children after her violent partner walked out. Social workers had repeatedly told her she needed to clean her house and get her children to school, otherwise they would be taken into care. However, they didn't really look at what was stopping Simone. When I reviewed the case with a social worker, it was clear that Simone was isolated and depressed. She was giving all her limited attention to her children's needs and receiving precious little herself. She felt her life was out of control, that she was a bad mother and had been a bad wife.

The social worker succeeded in getting Simone to see that if she had the skills to look after her children before her partner left, she still had those skills. The social worker motivated her to join a community parent and toddler group, which helped her meet other women. She is now taking a basic computing course and her self-esteem has increased. Not only has Simone become able to take care of her children properly, because her own needs are met more effectively, but she hopes to return to part-time work when the children are all at school.

One of the concepts at the heart of the human givens approach is the need to calm down emotional arousal before meaningful work can be carried out. Someone who is acutely upset, angry or anxious cannot hear what you say and only sees things from their point of view. Just helping them take a step back can work wonders.

One social worker who had attended a workshop on the human givens approach told me how a mother had rung her in a state of extreme distress to insist her teenager daughter be taken into care immediately. One moment she was ranting; the next she was crying. After a while of being on the receiving end of this emotional tirade, the social worker suddenly said, "What do you enjoy doing?" The mother was completely taken aback but, after a minute or so, said she enjoyed walking the dog. The social worker sensitively suggested that the mother do that for at least half an hour, after which the social worker would ring her back.

On her return, she was much calmer and willingly agreed to wait for a visit from the social worker the next day to look at support and help for her and her daughter.

What is crucial in all this - and integral to the human givens approach - is to convey the message to the people we are helping that we expect them to change for the better. When we do social work day in and day out, and see some of the same people on our case list for years on end, it is easy to feel, "this person (or this family) will never change."

Subconsciously, people read our expectation of them, and proceed to fulfil it, whatever possibilities they might have had for doing things differently. By concentrating on analysing needs objectively and devising solutions, the human givens approach prevents us from becoming mired in people's moving stories of misery that take away both their hope and our own.

One advantage of the simplicity of the human givens approach is that it can help overcome social workers' traditional fear that they aren't "expert" enough to offer counselling. Social work training may cover various counselling models, for example, psychodynamic, behavioural and cognitive. These might give social workers the impression that any counselling needed should be in-depth and relatively long term. On the contrary, positive results can be achieved in any contact with a service user, however brief. The skills to build rapport quickly, use imagination constructively, and reframe a mindset to put a positive slant on a seemingly negative situation, can all be learned within a human givens framework.

Because the human givens are about the physical and emotional needs that we all have, it works just as well in helping social workers reduce their own stress. When I counsel social workers suffering from work-related stress, I ask them to look at how well their emotional needs are being met. We have needs for receiving attention as well as giving it, and for connection and purpose outside our work as well as within it. If we are suffering from work-related stress, we may have no flow in our lives at all. The human givens framework makes it easy to gauge our work-life balance and plot out specific ways that, by helping ourselves, we can also better help others.

Jan Little is a trainer for Mindfields College.

Background information

For information about the human givens approach and a range of relevant seminars and workshops, contact Mindfields College on 01323 811440 or visit www.humangivens.com