Report of the Working Party on Social Work Support for the Health Service, June 1974.

  • Great Britain. Working Party on Social Work Support for the Health Service.
Date:
1974
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Report of the Working Party on Social Work Support for the Health Service, June 1974. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/76 (page 7)
    INTRODUCTION (1) The Secretary of State for Social Services announced in Parliament on 28 March 1973 the Government’s decision that social work support for the health service in England and Wales should from 1 April 1974—\the date of local government and NHS reorganisation—be provided by local authority social services departments. Hospital social workers should from that date be employed by local authorities and made available to the health service. (ii) This announcement followed a period of controversy, during which the main issue of principle—whether the NHS should look to local authorities for social work support, or continue to provide a separate service of its own—was considered at length by the Working Party on Collaboration. A full account of that Working Party’s conclusions has been published :* it reached a majority view that social work support for the NHS should be the responsibility of local authorities. The objective of NHS reorgani- sation was to provide an integrated service better adapted to meeting the health care needs of individual patients and of the community as a whole. Improved co-ordination of NHS and local authority services to provide a comprehensive system of care embracing health, social work and other community services was a central theme of this reorganisation, and the Working Party on Collaboration had been appointed to review the whole question of links between NHS and local authority services. They concluded that collaboration between the two services would develop most effectively if the professional skills on which they relied were concen- trated in the most appropriate service—medical, nursing and dental skills in the NHS, and social work skills in the local authority. This would promote the best development of professional skills and the best deploy- ment of scarce professional resources to meet the needs of patients. Each service should rely on the other for the skilled help it needed. (iii) The decision finally taken was based on consideration not only of the Working Party’s conclusions, but also of a considerable volume of subsequent representations and comment. It was clear that there would be much unease in both medical and social work circles about the decision; and in announcing it the Secretary of State, following a suggestion in the report of the Working Party on Collaboration, said: *‘We propose to set up a broadly-based working party, representing both health service and local authority interests, to examine the practical arrangements for the provision of social work support for the health service by the local authorities.” He added that the local authority associations had given assurances that local authorities would await the conclusions of the working party before taking any action in relation to the responsibilities they would assume for hospital social work. *Working Party on Collaboration: Report on activities to the end of 1972—HMSO, price 85p.