We publish in this issue an obituary for one of modern social work’s founding fathers—Noel Timms. For many social workers—particularly those who trained in the 1970s—his book with John Mayer, The Client Speaks (Mayer and Timms, 1970), marks a watershed moment in our understanding of exactly what this business of social work is all about. It is now so commonplace to acknowledge the service user as a central stakeholder and to use the language of personalised and user-directed support that it is all too easy to forget the journey that brought social work to this point. The Client Speaks landed on a social work profession working within a medical model of diagnosis and treatment, disturbing notions of professional superiority that underpinned intervention. Of course, it was never as stark a divide as that sounds and the development of a trusting relationship on which to base that professional assessment was also core. But the idea that ‘clients’ (as service users were then called) were ‘experts by experience’ and that empirical research is an important tool in empowering the users of services to contribute to the development of those services was ground-breaking at the time and has had a profound influence on the health and care professions—not just social work—ever since. We cannot afford to become complacent, however, and do well to remember another of Timms’s favoured concepts—that of vocation and service. Privileging the voice of the service user does not remove from social work its professional responsibility to use our knowledge, skills and power in the service of those who are marginalised, vulnerable and frequently feel powerless to address the problems that make their everyday lives a dispiriting struggle.
from The British Journal of Social Work Current Issue https://ift.tt/2NL4qg5
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