SWK 5002 Week 10 Discussion

SWK 5002 Week 10 Discussion

Student Name

Capella University

MSW: SWK5003

Professor Name

Date

SWK 5002 Week 10 Discussion

Politics is a powerful force on objectives, plans and unanticipated consequences of social welfare policy. One bright example is deinstitutionalisation. It was driven by a mixture of civil rights ideologies, psychopharmaceutical advances and the limit on state budgets to replace large psychiatric hospitals with outpatient care (Stein et al., 2022). The promise of the policy in terms of politics was dignity and integration; the real legacy in terms of practice was uneven, as the lawmakers never put in adequate money to pay for community services.

The gap was passed on to social workers who had to work with disconnected networks, limited housing and crisis-based care that resulted in homelessness or the criminal legal system with many clients. It wasn’t deinstitutionalisation that was a mistake, but that political will doesn’t stop at shutting down the institutions, but also maintaining good local support.

The development of managed behavioural health care is another example of the reshuffling of practice due to political imperatives, especially cost containment and accountability. Managed care extended benefits to many people and ensured that the use of brief interventions that have evidence of effectiveness, the monitoring of outcomes, and treating people equally with the benefits of medical care became the norm (Whitman et al., 2022).

But it also reduced clinical discretion, focused on short treatment episodes and added additional administrative burden in terms of authorisations and utilisation review. Social workers became interpreters of human need and actuarial logic and spoke for clients in the formularies, networks, and metrics (Hardy, 2020). There were those organisational changes that did improve coordination and those that did enhance silos of service, which made it more difficult to maintain continuity and culturally relevant care.

Another way that politics is manifested is in the issue of foster care drift, whereby children are left behind in temporary care, and are neither reunited with, nor placed under guardianship or adoption. Laws creating schedules of permanence can reduce drift; this can only be done in conjunction with family preservation, good kinship care and after permanency.

Fiscal incentives, judicial capacity and agency performance goals are implemented to govern political decisions; they should be toward throughput and not relationship; in case they are not, drift is perpetuated, and the agency performance goals hold back the attachment, identity and pathways of academic progress of the youth.

In conclusion, modern-day emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion brings to the surface ways in which past policies have marginalised and excluded communities of colour, Indigenous families, immigrants and youth from the gender binary, as well as people with disabilities. The newer DEI Lens demands disaggregated data, culturally-based services & policy-making with participation. It also requires challenging the analysis of those practices that hide bias, such as risk assessment tools, placement decisions or the eligibility for benefits that recreate disparities.

This also means evidence-based care coupled with cultural humility, language access, and activism for structural remedies in the social work practice, such as affordable housing and living wage employment. Lastly, politics will determine if DEI principles are statements of intent or financially-mandated mandates. They can convert criticisms over time to tangible access, quality and permanency gains to those social welfare systems they are meant to serve, along with sufficient resources and accountability.