I’m not usually an enthusiast for Palliative Medicine, which I regard as a largely non-human mag by doctors for doctors, but this month it has an article on social work competences from that very useful strain of work on what is palliative social work that has been going on in Canada, and a research review about bereavement needs assessment.

I’ve been hoping that the fad for competences had died the death. It assumes that you can define complex and interpersonal work in a series of rigid statements about particular bits of it.And that putting those bits together tells you something about a professional job.

However, for what it’s worth, they’ve come up with roles such as advocacy, assessment, care delivery, care planning, community capacity building, evaluation, decision-making, education, research, information sharing, interdisciplinary team, self-reflective practice – all current social work enthusiasms. Then there are several more that might develop in the future (i.e. they were too difficult) such as cultural competency, supporting spiritual needs, understandiong the social determinants of health, adapting to work environements, counselling and treatment planning and understanding multi-dimensional aspects of health and well-ness.

Such exercises fail to address the complexities of debates about many of these matters, and how the social work role in them, which might well be distinctive, overlaps with other professions. It often fails to ackbnowledge that different professions mean different things when they talk about apparently similar stuff.

However, having these things said in an organised way in a doctor’s magazine can’t do any harm, and it might make doctors aware that there’s something to think about outside their limited world.

Harvey Bosma, Meaghen Johnston, Susan Cadell, Wendy Wainwright, Ngaire Abernethy, Andrew Feron, Mary Lou Kelley, and Fred Nelson Creating social work competencies for practice in hospice palliative care
Palliat Med 2010 24: 79-8