Social Services Integration Urged

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31775, 4 September 1968, Page 11

Social Services Integration Urged

Advantages in forming councils of social service in New Zealand were outlined at a study afternoon on inter-agency referral organised by the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Association of Social Workers.

Mr D. J. McDonald, a Christchurch social worker and chairman of the association’s education and training committee, discussed different ways in which social workers shaped a workable frame of reference which included the inter-action of all community agencies.

“This trial and error method is not good enough,” he said. “If we are working in a bureaucratic system, we should have the full system like other industries.”

It was the responsibility of agencies to organise themselves at top level to establish a united front to community problems, Mr McDonald said. Goals and methods of work could then be transmitted to the front-line worker.

“How can these workers hope to communicate meaningfully if their agencies have no corporate liaison?” he asked. It was ironic that it was this association, the workers, who had been trying without much success to organise their employers into organising themselves, Mr McDonald said. “Unfortunately, much of this discussion is directed to the wrong audience, and the longer we allow it to persist, the harder it will be to make changes,” he said. The peculiar form of central government for statutory and many voluntary agencies, plus the so-far unbridged schism between statutory and voluntary management, provided further impediments to local consultation and joint action.

The president of the association’s Christchurch branch (Mr M. R. McGregor) said the question of inter-agency referrals was appropriate at the present time when social workers were being faced with more requests for service and were having to deal with more complex social problems. “New social services are being developed and it is becoming increasingly difficult

to keep up to date with the services available in the community,” he said. Much of the co-ordination of the social services in the community had been stimulated by members of the association. Much of this took place unofficially and in the social workers’ own time. “This should not be so, but it is in part our fault,” he said. “We have been slow to demonstrate that we have a productive and creative role in planning social change for the community.”