by Peter BeresfordTravel broadens the mind, but it's often more difficult for service users. There's an obvious reason for many people - they don't have enough money to get about much. Some are also restricted by failures to ensure access. The horror stories I have heard from disabled people, particularly wheelchair users, particularly about air travel, beggar belief. My problem is a slightly different one. One of the big difficulties that has been associated with my experience of mental health services has been agoraphobia - fear of open spaces - or as it was for me quite simply fear of going out. This has got better, but travel is still a worry and I can't cope with flying. This of course restricts the amount I can travel any great distance and means that I have to use land and sea rather than air - which means much more time. I am hoping though that things will get better as everyone gets more aware of the need to reduce their carbon footprint and effective alternatives to air travel are made easier to access.
This year however, I have been travelling. I am writing this from Sweden where I have been really fortunate to be involved in an initiative concerned with developing service user involvement in social work education. A panel of three of us - an academic, a service user - both from Sweden - and me as someone with both experiences - have been going round eight of Sweden's social work education departments meeting people and seeing the progress that is being made to take user involvement forward in social work education.
Enthusiasm and interest
It has been a great initiative to be part of. What's been especially positive has been that we have had the chance at each college to meet staff, managers, service users and students. I have come to realise that perhaps students have not been adequately involved in these developments and discussions always in England. If that's right it is a shame, because we have encountered such enthusiasm, interest and overlaps - with students highlighting their own first hand experience as service users as well as the learning they are gaining through professional training.
For me of course it has been a special treat to meet such a wide range of service users from a different country, with different backgrounds, experience, but again the same determination to work for their and other people's rights as is to be encountered in England and wherever else people are able to advance user involvement.
Transformed for the better
This experience has really driven home some important things for me - coming as it does around the same time as all the hostile publicity and scapegoating that has been surrounding the terrible Baby P case. It becomes very clear that if service user perspectives are truly equally engaged and included in social work education, then that is transformed for the better and then there can be the chance for social work practice also to be regenerated.
I can hardly claim to be an expert on statutory social work in Sweden, but first impressions suggest that they are facing many of the same problems that we know only too well in the UK, of managerialism, social workers being expected to work in narrow bureaucratic and legalistic ways and restricted in how far they are truly able to work alongside service users in empowering and liberatory ways.
There is clearly a desire among service users, students and staff to work in such ways, just as there is in Britain. I believe from both our experiences, that advancing user involvement has an important part to play in this. It makes it possible to reaffirm our humanity as service users and workers, to recognise the overlaps in our identity, to build alliances, and to take pride in our first hand experience, rather than be made to feel that is somehow inferior to book learning. Both of course have a part to play.
Learning together
One big development here in Sweden has been a course at one college, Lund University, which has now been run a number of times, where students and service users learn together and both get credits for completing the course. What I have been hearing is that user involvement not only helps social workers to understand service users better, but also service users to gain a better appreciation of social workers. This must be helpful. We have made some good progress around user involvement in UK social work education. I think such involvement may have a much greater value than has yet fully been realised, returning the profession to its humanistic role and understanding and challenging the devaluing and mechanisation of social work that the tragic death of Baby P may ultimately be seen to be an expression of.
I really agree with Peter when he says that user involvement helps both the social workers and the users to understand each other better. As a carer for 20 years of a daughter with a severe and enduring mental illness I have been involved for some time with health and social care staff training. I have found that not only have the health and social care workers gained more of an understanding of the experiences of carers but, in turn I and other carers have gained a greater appreciation of the difficulties that the staff face.