Bringing other voices into the room: Reporting (and imagining) service user speech in social work supervisions

Joe Webb

Supervision is an opportunity for social workers and team leaders to discuss and reflect on the people they work with, their lives, their issues and how best to help/support them. However, of course, these people are not present to talk for themselves, and one can only guess how they may think or feel. So how do social workers and team managers go about exploring this uncertain space in supervision? One strategy that has been observed is to not only report what the service users have said, but go further and speak as if they were the service user(s), and what they may be thinking or feeling. It is worth noting that they have not been told to do this, and both parties never refer to this practice. This presentation will explore why they do this, what occasions talking as service users, and what bringing other voices into the room accomplishes in this context.