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Lunch and refreshments provided.

Background & Context

During our SWAMH Talktime Event in December 2024, one theme that resonated with many Social Workers in Adult Mental Health was how many MHSWs are working within what feels like a Medicalised Model and the challenges that this can present for SW.  The SWAMH SIG listened to these concerns and decided to focus our next CPD event on the unique skills that Mental Health Social Workers bring to this profession. We have focused on Relationship Based Practice for this CPD event – particularly the theory around Relationship Based Practice in Social Work and the skills SWs are equipped with in our training and education to enhance our practice and the quality of service provided. We will also focus on how we can support ourselves in our practice against stress and burnout and look at ways that we can continue to provide high quality relationship based work within a medical model.  

Abstracts

Gillian Ruch

Having spent 40 years in the social work profession, if there was one piece of practice wisdom I would want pass onto the social work community it is 'feelings come first'. In this presentation I will explore the inextricably inter-connected nature of affect across the individual-organisational social work continuum. Drawing on seminal psychoanalytic concepts and theoretical frameworks I will argue that paying attention to the affective dimensions of social work practice at the individual and collective levels is essential if, as a profession, we are to promote social justice and enhance service user safety and wellbeing.  

Erna O’Connor

Social workers work at the interface of communities and the state; service users and service providers; people's private and public lives and their inner and outer worlds. Skills in building, understanding, nurturing, maintaining and ending relationships are integral to practice.  This presentation reviews the social work skillset and explores approaches to developing practice using a relationship-based, trauma-informed lens.  

Alan Maddock

Alan’s talk will highlight the high rates of stress and burnout within mental health social work and highlight the effects they can have on the individual social worker’s capacity to tune into and work effectively within relationship dyads with service users. Alan will highlight the roles that mindfulness, and mindfulness-based mechanisms of action (attention regulation, non-attachment, non-aversion, acceptance and self-compassion) can play in reducing stress, feelings of burnout and increasing self-awareness and improving relationship based social work practice. Alan will outlined how these mechanisms of action can support reflexive social work practice through an increased awareness of the structural impediments that can reduce social worker’s capacity to operate in a relationship focussed way (i.e., working within a medical model of care).

Programme

9.00am Registration/Tea, Coffee & Pastries

10.00am Welcome from Kerry Cuskelly, SWAMH chair

10.10am What's Going on Here?: Understanding our Own, Others and Organisations' Feelings (Gillian Ruch)  

11.00 – 11.20am Tea/Coffee

11.20am Social Work - A Relationship-Based Skillset (Erna O’Connor)  

12.10am Reflective piece

12.40 – 1.45pm Lunch

1.45pm Relationship Based Practice: Theory and Practice But Mostly Experience (Siobhan MacClean)

2.30 – 2.35 Comfort break

2.35pm Being Present: Self-care, Relationship Based and Reflexive Social Work Practice (Alan Maddock)

3.15pm Q&A and Panel Discussion

3.40pm Reflections (Gillian Ruch)

3.50pm Closing Remarks

4.00pm Close Event

Speaker Biographies

Gillian Ruch

Gillian Ruch is Professor of Social Work in the Department of Social Work and Social Care at the University of Sussex. She teaches and researches in the areas of child care social work and relationship-based and reflective practice and is committed to enhancing the wellbeing of children, families and practitioners. Her particular interests are in promoting psycho-social research methods and reflective discussion and supervision forums that facilitate relationship-based practice and promote practitioner wellbeing. Gillian has co-edited, with Danielle Turney and Adrian Ward, Relationship-based Social Work: Getting to the Heart of Practice and publishes widely on relationship-based and reflective practice.

Dr Erna O Connor

Erna is an Assistant Professor of Social Work and Practice Education Co-ordinator at the School of Social Work and Social Policy Trinity College, Dublin and is a CORU registered social worker. She was Director of the Master in Social Work programme from 2014-2020 and Director of Postgraduate Teaching & Learning from 2021-2023. Erna is a founder member of the National Practice Teaching in Social Work Initiative (NPTSWI). Together with her colleague Dr Sinéad Whiting, Erna developed a Hybrid Placement Model, which was widely used as a response to the Covid pandemic.

Prior to joining the university Erna worked as a social worker in drug treatment and HIV services and a senior and acting principal social worker in hospital-based social work. Her PhD, titled 'Relationship-based Social Work: A 'Thirdspace' in Responding to Trauma', was based on practitioner research, and awarded in 2015. Erna maintains involvement in direct service provision as a volunteer with a mental health support service and a board member of ATD Ireland. Her teaching and research interests focus on social work practice and include bereavement, trauma informed practice, poverty aware practice and relationship-based practice.

Siobhan Maclean

Siobhan has been a social worker for 35 years and became a practice educator in 1995. Siobhan has worked independently for a number of years. As an independent her work is varied but includes training, devising practice learning resources and consultancy work. Siobhan still very much enjoys working as a practice educator and currently works with a few students a year in an off site capacity.

In 2004 Siobhan was appointed to the position of Secretary of the International Federation of Social Workers, holding this position for eight years. She still maintains close international links and enjoys working to support practice educators in countries where social work education is in the early stages of development.

Siobhan has written widely, mostly around social work theory and critical reflection. She is committed to making the knowledge base accessible to busy practitioners and set up Kirwin Maclean Associates as an independent publishing organisation based on the values and ethics of social work.

Siobhan recently moved to Northern Ireland where she has enjoyed taking on the practice teacher role. Moving contexts and getting used to a different set of standards and paperwork has reminded Siobhan just what it feels like to be new to a role.

Siobhan is a fellow of the RSA.

Dr. Alan Maddock is a Lecturer in Psychology at the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Maddock is a professionally qualified social worker who supported the mental health of persons experiencing homelessness, and young people. His main interests are in mental health, mindfulness and research which highlights and attempts to meet the mental health and social well-being needs of marginalised groups.

Alan Maddock; alanmaddock@rcsi.ie; Department of Health Psychology, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Beaux Lane House, Dublin 2, Ireland.