Some social work departments in hospices are calling themselves family support or some such label, to avoid the opprobrium that goes with being called ’social worker’. What this does is get to the point where nobody recognises the valuable bits of social work because all the positive things we do, like palliative social work, remain unrecognised.

However, support is not the thing to go for.  An experienced fund-raiser recently said to me that the public perception of support is of a low-level activity by non-professionals. And a group of carers I talked to recently did not like to think they were being ’supported’; they thought this was a bit of an insult: who was this professional who thought they were so inadequate that they wanted supporting. They had the same attitude to needs; they didn’t like to see themselves as having needs, although they recognised that there were some things that they could no longer manage that at one time they could. We’ve got into all this stuff about needs because government wants us assess needs, so that it can make rationing decisions.

Of course, support as an idea has a long history of controversy in social work. One of the first debates in the 1950s was about what approach to psychoanalytic social work. The debate ended up with saying that social work was about ‘ego-supportive’ practice, that is, helping people to attain rational control of their lives, instead of being driven by impulse. We would say the same thing now but in different words. But this debate is the source of some of the historical commentary about social workers supporting people.

Then, when psychoanalysis got the boot as the basis of social work, people tried to be all rational and task-focused. I remember being forbidden to use the term support by the fieldwork assistant director of my social services department in the 70s because it was woolly: what precisely did I mean that I was going to do and what was what I was going to do going to achieve for the people I was working with? This sort of attitude threw out  l’enfant avec l’eau du bain, because it stopped people talking about support at all, when really what we should have been doing is specifying what kind of behaviour was supportive..

I had a go at this in one of my books during the 1980s: I suggested support required use to set up alerting mechanisms and increase people’s confidence that we would respond if we were alerted to a problem. However, unfortunately, children’s social care practitioners have screwed that idea up by ignoring quite trenchant alerts to things going wrong in the lives of children they were supposed to be supervising, so nobody believes we will react to anything; this of course is partly a result of poor resources in social work – there isn’t enough staff to respond even if they hear something. one of the things about telecare services that get alarms from people who have call buttons round their neck is the importance of tanking round there to do something if you do get an alarm even if it turns out to be an accidental press of the button.

So I’m still in the same place: don’t say you’re supporting people, it offends them. Instead, say precisely what you’re going to do, then make sure you do it. It’s a bit like a manifesto for the profession, but I suppose manifestos are a bit discredited at the moment too.