The BU PIER partnership works with over 100 individual members (people with lived experience) and local, regional and national organisations to embed the lived experienced in health and social work education and research. Our members often explain that they enable students to learn and develop their practice in ways students can never get from a textbook.
Well…until now that is...
A Guide to Statutory Social Work Interventions: the lived experience, edited by Dr Mel Hughes is published on 23 May 2019.
The book covers a range of statutory social work interventions such as being detained under the Mental Health Act, having a child removed to a place of safety or having a carers assessment. Each chapter is written by someone with that lived experience. They share their background, the context in which the intervention took place; what happened; what has happened since and what their message to social workers is.
Formal content such as underpinning legislation, policies and research, have been added by a social worker or social work academic (or combined when contributors have both areas of expertise) along with the social worker’s perspective. The book enables students and practising social workers to learn from the expertise of people with lived experience and to use this to consider how the law is enacted in practice and the impact of this on people’s lives.
As one of the contributors says
When you become involved, however brief, you then form part of that person’s history.
