Publications from ODSW Social Insights: Letters by DSW (Vol 1) | Page 42

Advocacy 1

they are posed to clients. When you start to do this, you will soon realize
the assumptions that we have and how we operate our programs and
organizations. We should always be checking our assumptions and reasons
for them. When we have collected the data, we should analyze and distill the
data. We do this so that the data can be used to advocate for improvements
and changes such as advocating for additional staff at peak demand hours
or developing an outreach program for the hours and times of the week
when demand falls short. One set of data that is often used in advocating for
services is the number and type of cases that are turned away or sometimes
called “referrals denied data”. The same data can be used to advocate for
the community to play a role or for donors to fill the gap which is an unmet
need.
Another current issue that intrigues many is the admission criteria for patients
for social care or long term care. Admissions are often denied for patients
who require additional equipment to support the care (eg lifting equipment,
bed size and ancillary equipment). This could lead to a study about cases
with such requirements that cannot find a placement. The study should also
consider how struggling home health care can benefit from such a support
and how to organize players and resources to meet this service gap. This too,
is a form of progression from case to cause advocacy.
At the systems level, social workers must always keep in mind the impact
of policy and policy changes on individuals, families, groups, organizations
and communities. Participating in these forums and platforms is strategic for
social work practice to influence the framing of issues and approaches. We
do participate but there is room to have a direct consumer representation on
task forces, needs assessment projects, and policy evaluation. The current
form of consumer participation when it happens is in the form of focus group
discussions. Although social workers are increasingly represented in task forces
and we may provide both the practitioner and consumer perspectives in such
platforms, we must not come to accept that we are the consumer voice. We
are not, and we may want to advocate for direct consumer representation in
some instances.

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