Читать книгу Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic - Группа авторов - Страница 6

The present collection originated in a series of joint webinars run by the Social Work Action Network (International) and the International Federation of Social Workers in response to the COVID-​19 pandemic. The webinars drew a large audience from within the social work community and we decided to pull the contributions together in book form to allow social work academics, practitioners and students to start to think through what social work can, and should, do in the face of the global crisis.

We would like to thank Policy Press for their prompt agreement to publish and to the contributors who turned round their short chapters in a very short space of time.

The collection brings together frontline practitioners, academics and social movement activists. The chapters are deliberately short so we can include more voices. The referencing is appropriate but ‘light touch’ because we wanted to produce an accessible, easily readable text. We hope the collection will help inform the debate over what kind of social work is required in the face of the pandemic crisis.

Finally, as the pandemic spread it has been frontline health, social care and social workers who have found themselves at the heart of the crisis. In too many places government failures have left them exposed with inadequate personal protection equipment (PPE) and essential resources. The ‘old’ managerialist concerns with targets and ‘business as usual’ has been exposed as irrelevant in the face of the crisis. Yet despite this, care workers ‘stepped forward’. Their selflessness and commitment to the greater good was inspiring and often, in their work, they started to provide glimpses of what ‘another social work’ might look like. We would like to dedicate this book to all those health and care workers who worked to provide care and support to those in need at a time of crisis.

Michael Lavalette

Vasilios Ioakimidis

Iain Ferguson

August 2020