Innovative Approaches to Involving Service Users in Palliative Care Social Work Education

Abstract

Service user involvement in social work education is now a firmly established concept in the United Kingdom. As a result, it is common practice for service users to occupy central roles in the education and training of social work students and staff in both qualifying and post-qualifying programmes. This paper describes an initiative, undertaken in Northern Ireland, which compares two methods of user involvement employed with undergraduate and post-qualifying social work students. In both situations the students firstly observed and discussed DVD excerpts of narratives from people affected by cancer and secondly observed a live facilitated interview with a 25-year-old male service user who shared his experiences of being diagnosed with cancer at a young age. Understanding the social work role in palliative care is crucial as all social workers, regardless of practice context, will have some degree of involvement in helping individuals and families to address end-of-life care issues. This paper compares the findings of evaluations from two student groups which may help to inform social work educators about the effectiveness of different teaching methods used to achieve meaningful and effective user involvement with seldom heard groups.