Enhancing Professionality Through Reflectivity in Social and Health Care

This book discusses complex motivational conditions and strategies on macro, meso, and micro levels promoting reflectivity in interpersonal professional practice. 

The increasing demands made on practitioners in social and health services, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to great uncertainty over how to find "the right response" to complex expressions of need and how to account for ethical professional decisions in view of prevailing strategies of ’risk reduction’ and managerial accounting. Reflectivity has been recognised as being of central importance for guiding practitioners towards situationally differentiated and accountable practice. However, it is a complex process made up not only of different psychological components and their interplay with educational and organisational contexts, but also of multilevel interactions and purely situational conditions that can have positive or negative effects. The individual and team reflectivity can be learned and supported through various educational and managerial opportunities, sensitively guided personal and professional experiences and specific patterns of interaction which are reviewed in the book.  

Reflective supervision in the workplace plays a pivotal role in enabling individual and team reflective processes. However, there are also social and organisational factors that can hinder the development of individual and team reflectivity. The particular value of this publication is that the authors focus on complex research findings from several consecutive studies and critically review and discuss the conditions for reflectivity from various perspectives and with the background of rich academic literature and research. Their research-derived empirical and analytical insights were submitted to managers and educators, and effective and realistic strategies and methods to enhance different levels of reflectivity in students and practitioners were discussed and are summarised in this volume. Among the topics covered:

• The significance of reflectivity in professional social and health care in relation to changing socio-political contexts 
• Gender aspects of reflectivity in the social and healthcare field
• Operationalisation of reflectivity for research by personal, team and organisational scales 
• Cultural and communicational patterns of interaction enabling professional reflective processes

Enhancing Professionality Through Reflectivity in Social and Health Care is pertinent reading for professors of professional academic training programmes for social workers, nurses, supervisors, trainers in non-formal learning settings, students, and managers of social and health services with an interest in enhancing organisational cultures.

Walter Lorenz, PhD is a recognized expert on professional social work education. German by birth he trained as a social worker at LSE and practiced in East London before teaching social work in Ireland, Italy and other European countries. As president of the European Centre for Community Education he steered the first Erasmus Thematic Network for the Social Professions in the 1990s which helped to develop country-specific curricula in various European countries, oriented towards the creation of autonomous professionals. Together with Hans-Uwe Otto he was co-founder of the International Summer Academy TISSA and launched the European Journal of Social Work and later the online journal Social Work and Society. Since retiring from the Free University of Bozen, Italy he holds a visiting appointment at Charles University Prague. His research and development specialties are didactic forms of professional courses that enhance students’ reflective abilities, integrating knowledge, experience and personality with sound social policy analysis.   

Zuzana Havrdová, CSc is a clinical psychologist, trained psychotherapist and clinical supervisor who practices individual, group and team supervision in social work and uses her extensive experience in guiding supervision training. In the last 20 years she has been the Lecturer and Programme leader of the master's programme in Management and Supervision in Social and Health organisations at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, and board leader and supervisor of the PhD programme in Social Work, both of which were founded by her. She is part of the group of experts who have been building up social work in the Czech Republic after 1989, giving particular attention to the aspects of practice and social work methods (e.g., developing competences and minimum standards in social work practice) in collaboration with other schools of social work. She has extensive experience in developing study courses and curricula for master's and PhD levels in social work and social and health care and was also a leader and member of EU international higher education programme. She has co-edited and co-authored international books and papers in partnership with scholars from different European countries (Finland, Scotland, Portugal). Her research and educational focus is on external supervision in helping professions, which is based on collaborative reflection and knowledge of good practice.