Lyn Romeo - Chief Social Worker transcript

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I was really delighted to come today and meet all the students who are nearing the end of their degrees, and they were really engaged very positive. I've looked around at their research posters today and I was really impressed with thequality of the work that they're done and their passion for the areas. They'd looked into and it really is heartening and uplifting to see that they are going to be the social workers of tomorrow and I think they're going to be a brilliant addition to our great profession. Social work is a real it's a really practice based profession. It's about working directly with people and making the professional use of self. The key mechanism for engaging with and working alongside people and it's based on an understanding of human development of people's social contexts in our environment of some of the social determinants of health and well-being such as housing, income security The impact of may be traumatic or difficult experiences where people may be living in vulnerable circumstances. The social worker works with people to try and overcome some of those challenges by supporting them to identify what their strengths and the positives are and how that can be used to look at achieving a better life, and sometimes that means negotiating and working across agencies, pulling in the resources as needed, being a coordinator and Link worker across all of those things but having a really good understanding of the legislation and the potential to make change happen. So a good understanding of theory and research about change and what's possible the next 10 years I think is a real challenge for social workers. It's about how does social workers work alongside much more proactively, as partners, authentic partners with people they work with individuals, families, communities to really cope, reduce the kind of care and support or opportunities that will make a difference to people. So it's quite a complex challenge because it's how you have a different power relationship with the people you work with and how you utilize the resources that are available to really support people to enjoy better lives. So working in much more multi-agency type approaches particularly taking much more account of people's environment, people in their place, what's possible in communities, in neighbourhoods, and how do we work with our housing colleagues, with our local councils, and how they're trying to shape a better environment for everyone. And also very importantly with our health colleagues who are also looking to have a much more community-based self-management approach to supporting people with health conditions. There's lots of areas you can work in so there's health settings working with child and family situations working in communities, working in even in palliative care end of life care. All of these areas are open to social work and social work skills so lots of opportunity and everybody's always looking for great social workers to be a part of their team.