RELEVANCE OF COUNSELLING IN SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

COUNTLESS people are perplexed (including me during my early years of practice) about the meaning and applicability of ‘counselling’ in relation to social work.

To such an extreme that most direct contact with clients has been designated as counselling.
According to my experience, it is common to catch my colleagues complaining that they do not have enough time, the right environment or even effective skills of offering counselling to their clients. Conversely, some feel their work revolves around counselling.

All being said and done, there is evidence that there is no consensus about what we really mean when we speak about ‘counselling’. Some clients even ‘prescribe ’counselling for themselves. It is common to get clients who demand or feel they deserve and need counselling as part of their care and support.

My article acknowledges that there are many professions that practice counselling as part of their routine service activities. However, I propose to deliberately introduce and focus to clarify this commonly used intervention on a social work foundation.
The term ‘counselling’ became a buzzword in the 1970’s, the reason being that case work mostly concentrated on an individual and his family in comparison to a group work.

However, one may safely agree that, where environmental factors were a concern of causing social problems, group work skills was inevitable. This status core resulted in a number of social scientists lashing the concept of counselling. It was observed to be either blaming the individual or giving individual problems more attention at the expense of the community and societies. (Forder 1966)
Counselling plays a pivotal role in the field of social work practice in the form of person oriented and advisory altitudes.

Whatever merits we have about this concept, history has shown that this term is also a label applied widely in most activities as far as non- social work oriented workers. To some social workers it might appear that counselling has been surpassed by procedures simply because most of our colleagues are over powered by bureaucratic and directive orders that seek to meet requirements and standards requisite by their organisations and employers.

In  most countries like Britain where social work has been brought from as a commodity to developing countries like Swaziland, social services has been sluggishly turned around to adequate  the nature of  business thinking and more appreciated  economically. This usage of change is habitually associated with ‘managerialism’ where social service provision is offered on lower costs by many organisations. These evolutions are often derived from the industry world.

A scholar like Jordan (1987) believes that the bulk of activities experienced by social workers make it strenuous for most to involve themselves with counselling. Some end up trusting that that their counselling skills are now obsolete. This is evident in Swaziland, where by social workers may be involved in dispensing of elderly grants and also play roles of being developmental officers at the expense of their own social work activities? This common mark makes them refer their clients somewhere else for management like counselling. As a reminder, social work aim to promote a client’s well-being in a holistic manner.
Furthermore, cases like child abuse take a bulk of a social worker’s time in terms of assessments, home visits, record writing, referrals, court procedures and so forth. Since social workers do not have a monopoly in counselling, other experts like psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, therapists, clergy, lay people and trained volunteers may be more likely to take a counselling position anytime.
Conclusively, the author subscribes to the view that, counselling is still relevant to social work practice. Constraints like resources(man power), the right environment(structures) to achieve counselling goals still exist in most of our organisations, consequently giving an impression that it is no longer used or needed by most social work practitioners. In Swaziland for instant, the role of counselling and advocacy is often used to complement each other because of our client’s economic background I order to deal with issues like poverty. I hope this article has highlighted some valid issues.

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