One of my publications flops on to the desk in a new book on evidence-based practice published in English from Germany, and containing papers by a stellar list of people involved in EBP. Unlike many books on EBP, this one is not a text telling you the claimed evidence about some aspect of social work, or a book telling you that everything you do should be based on evidence. Instead, it is suitably critical of the both the concept and how it is used; or at least mostly, Bruce Thyer is, as always, messianic about it.

At the conference on which it is based, one of the American enthusiasts for EBP told me how shocked he was that a pristine academic idea had been adopted by governments to tell social workers what to do, or restrict what they can do. This was not what he thought he was doing, and he could understand why people from outside America were critical: a useful contributor to improving professionals’ individual practice has been taken over as a rationing and controlling device. I don’t think Bruce would be repentant, however, because the enthusiasts think, like governments, that everyone should be using EBP.

My contribution to this was an analysis of the ‘evidence’ in the NICE guidance on palliative care to show that evidence is analysed from a (healthcare) point of view, which invalidates it for other practices. Therefore, practitioners need to interpret understanding wisely as part of their own (in our case, social work) practice.

I pointed out that if you look behind the generalised statements, NICE promotes the grades of psychological practice (for which it openly says there is little research evidence) that exclude social workers and nurses and says that only psychologists and psychiatrists can practise at the highest levels of psychological intervention, on the basis of a range of studies where most of the work was done by nurses and social workers.

The problem for psychological and social work in healthcare, I go on to argue, is that the focus of research is on healthcare objectives. So, again an example from this publication, while very good research on palliative day care shows that it does not meet quality of care health objectives, all the evidence is that patients like it. Why the inconsistency? Because day care has social care objectives, which nobody has bothered to investigate because they are not healthcare objectives for which there is loads of research money and about which politicians and healthcare practitioners and administrators are mainly interested.

Payne, M. (2009) Knowledge, evidence and the wise person of practice: the example of social work and social care in palliative care, in Otto, H.-U., Polutta, A. and Ziegler, H. (eds) Evidence-based practice – Modernising the Knowledge Base of Social Work? Opladen/Farmington Falls, MI: Barbara Budrich: 77-94.

The book is: Otto, Hans-Uwe, Polutta, Andreas & Ziegler, Holger (eds)(2009) Evidence-based Practice – Modernising the Knowledge Base of Social Work? Opladen: Barbara Budrich

The publisher’s website: http://www.budrich-verlag.de/index_en.php?SID=93fc6a0abb9674f664c13534e55091dd