Strengths Based Approaches in Adult Social Care Conference: Assets, Strengths and Relationality

ExChange Wales at Cardiff University is running a free online conference on Strengths Based Approaches in Adult Social Care in February and March. 

The conference will include webinars, recordings, podcasts and blogs. It is suitable for social care practitioners, managers, academics and students.

Assets, Strengths and Relationality: integrating approaches in theory and practice?

With Jerry Tew, Professor of Mental Health and Social Work, and Jon Franklin, Swansea Council Adult Services, Local Area Coordination Implementation Manager.

Across the UK, we have seen innovations in social care that have sought to move beyond the Care Management ‘pipeline’ of assessing people for services on the basis of their deficits and vulnerabilities. Alternative approaches seek to mobilise the resources (personal/family/community) that may be available to people that would enable them to lead the sort of life that they aspire to. However, there can be some conceptual wooliness about what strengths based practice actually is or is not – and there is a need to clarify both language and underpinning theory if we are to be effective in changing ways of working.

In this Webinar, Professor Jerry Tew will explore the inter-related concepts of Assets, Strengths and Relationality, and their links to theoretical understandings of capability and capitals. To illustrate how these ideas play out in practice, Jon Franklin will present one practice model – Local Area Coordination – which is making a big impact in Swansea. This approach, which originates in Australia, is embedded in local micro-communities and helps to mobilise people’s resources by connecting people and assets through patient processes of relationship building: walking alongside rather than doing to or doing for.