‘Equipping social workers to meet 21st century challenges relating to death and dying’

By Denise Turner

The proposed assisted dying legislation, which is currently being debated in Parliament, recommends social workers are appointed to multi-disciplinary panels, making decisions about assisted dying requests, following sign-off by two doctors.

This is an important potential change in the social work role. However, death and dying have always been firmly embedded within the profession, either directly, through people who are terminally ill or have experienced the death of a loved one, or indirectly, through intergenerational grief and loss. In public consciousness, social work is also, perhaps, most commonly associated with high-profile child deaths.

In addition, rapidly advancing technology has transformed many aspects of death and dying, whilst challenges such as knife crime also require an understanding of the contemporary landscape. Moreover, an increasingly diverse population requires social workers to understand multi-cultural bereavement practices.

No mandated learning on death and dying

However, despite the prevalence of death and bereavement within social work, the current education curriculum does not mandate any specific form of learning in this area.

A previous study (Turner and Price, 2021) found a paucity of research specifically concerned with understanding the bereavement experiences of students from diverse cultural backgrounds and that this may then be reflected in their practice experiences. It found there was an increased need for specific bereavement training and support within social work programmes, alongside skills and knowledge around cultural diversity and the part this plays in the bereavement process.

Work by other academics in the field has highlighted an over-reliance on five stages theories of Kubler-Ross, which were developed in the 1960s.

The limitations of current social work education may render practitioners ill-equipped to deal with contemporary aspects of death and dying, resulting in a potentially poorer service for people they work with, as well as risks to social workers’ own wellbeing.

A new network on death and dying

In the light of this, the Social Work Approaches to Death and Dying network (SWADD) was set up by a group of interested social work academics, with the aim of improving practice through investigating and updating the social work curriculum as it relates to death and bereavement.

The SWADD group piloted a small quantitative research study, which was sent to higher education institutions offering social work education in the UK. We are still collecting data from this survey, but existing responses have already highlighted the lack of consistency in the social work curriculum, with consequent implications for social work practice.

Contemporary issues such as the impact of technology on the field of death and dying, contested topics such as assisted dying and the need to understand cultural diversity are not reliably covered within the social work curriculum.

A lack of consistency in the curriculum

Additionally, where there is education on death and dying, this is often down to the interests of specific lecturers, so students are not consistently learning from those with lived experience in this area, or from experts in other disciplines with relevant knowledge.

For example, in the pilot research, findings showed that teaching on death and bereavement was variously embedded within a theories module, or as a dedicated skills day, with some universities focusing on children’s bereavement, and others more specifically on the mental health aspects of bereavement.

The variations in the teaching of this core life experience mean that students may be leaving social work education with wide discrepancies in their knowledge and skills, with consequent implications for their practice, where death and loss are so prevalent.

Find out more

The SWADD group will be presenting its initial work at Social Work England’s Social Work Week, on Friday 21 March as part of the research spotlight session, which runs from 3pm-4.30pm.

Findings so far are extremely limited so the SWADD group is hoping to recruit further social work educators interested in this area and also to encourage further participation in the survey, which can be found here.

If you are interested in joining the SWADD group, please contact Professor Denise Turner at d.turner4@herts.ac.uk or sign up for our SWADD session on 21 March – we look forward to seeing you there.

Professor Denise Turner works in the school of health and social work at the University of Hertfordshire