Experiences of Students, Service Delivery Organisations and Community Members of Service Delivery to a Disadvantaged Community by Social Work Students

Abstract

INTERVIEWS WITH COMMUNITY MEMBERSPROBLEM STATEMENTThis research is part of a more extensive research project in which the Departments of Social Work, Nursing and Communication collaborated to investigate the experiences of senior students' health care service delivery to a disadvantaged community, and to make recommendations to enhance quality multi-disciplinary health care service delivery to a disadvantaged community by the students of the University as part of their experiential learning.This article will focus on the experience of the fourth-year social work students only. As part of their practical training in Social Work at the North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus), fourth-year students are required to render services to a disadvantaged community during a three-month internship at a service delivery organisation. For several years now the Department of Social Work has been offering services in various forms to a disadvantaged community through the students as part of their experiential learning. Experiential learning is an integral part of social work education. It is a collaborative effort between public and service delivery organisations and universities. Since student social workers work with individuals, families, groups and communities in real-life settings, they need to be intensively supervised by a supervisor from a delivery organisation and a lecturer from the University. This teaching and learning model in social work has evolved over many years and is internationally recognized as the most successful way of training a social worker over the course of a period of study (Association for South African Social Work Education Institutions (ASASWEI), 2006:4).According to Wondmiku, Feleke and Tafete (2005:179), service learning is a valuable learning method. "Balancing the service and teaching objectives and maintaining the quality of both can be attained through careful twining of the objectives of both components". The service rendered by the students during experiential learning is especially directed at the disadvantaged community, and is in line with the focus specified in the White Paper for the Transformation of the Health System of South Africa (1997:13). The services rendered by the students included work at government and non-governmental organisations, home-based services to people living with HIV and AIDS, community projects such as planting eco-circle gardens, doing group work, assisting with parent guidance (Botswadi), empowering children, working with alcoholrelated problems, investigating child neglect and abuse, planning foster care, helping to obtain grants and handing out food parcels.The arrangements to provide these services were made by the lecturers with people in the community whom they had identified as key people for the purposes of fulfilling the educational requirements, taking into consideration the areas where they thought the needs of the community were greatest. The Department of Social Work was virtually offering services based mainly on the requirements for exper...

The expansion of developmental social work in Southern and East Africa: Opportunities and challenges for social work field programmes

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