Faculty Lecturer Shares Expertise in New Book
Faculty Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Elaine Aspinwall-Roberts, has written a new book, featuring real life examples from her own social work experience.
The book, ‘The Pocketbook Guide to Assessments in Social Work with Adults’, is published in May, and gives advice to social workers working in adult social care on how to make their assessments the best, most effective and person-centred they can be.
The book is part of a new Social Work Pocketbooks series from the Open University Press, published in conjunction with the Community Care website. The series hopes to provide practical advice and guidance for newly qualified social workers and social work students which will help them in their everyday practice. The Pocketbook series will be launched in London in June.
The book is friendly, non-patronising and realistic about the day-to-day difficulties and challenges associated with assessing adults in social care. It encourages readers to reflect on their work and what they bring to tasks. It contains practical examples, advice and tips, along with how to deal with pitfalls in practice. It provides advice on working constructively with others in the field and how to develop your communication and assessment skills with adults. Each chapter also contains a handy checklist of points raised. Focusing on the ‘person to person’ relationship in assessment, the book considers areas such as being well prepared, asking difficult questions, establishing trust and reducing anxieties and dealing with assessment problems.
Elaine qualified as a social worker in 1992 and has worked as a social worker and manager, working with older adults and people with learning disabilities and physical disabilities. Elaine joined the teaching staff at LJMU in 2007.
Emma Cooper, a Social Worker who reviewed the book, said: “Assessments in Social Work with Adults is an engaging and informative read, addressing key legal and practice issues in adult social care in a succinct manner. It provides you with the tools to work creatively and collaboratively with service users, even within the increasing bureaucracy of modern social work. I would highly recommend it.”
The book can be purchased from Amazon for £9.99.
Content owner: Katherine Geer
