The Achilles Heel of the Helping Professions - Essay Example

Human service organizations the world over and characterized by their relationships with their clients. These relationships are classified in a variety of ways, formal and informal. The informal classifications build on the formal labels and vary from situation to situation. The road to understanding these relationships then is to adopt a approach to the formal relationships and then understand that the informal categories are merely casually alligned to these. The Department of Public Social Services DPSS, Medical Approved Department can be said to following the the frameworks of many human service organizations.The framework of this discussion will be based on the seminal work by Abraham Alcabes and James A. Jones, Client Socialization: The Achilles Heel of the Helping Professions Alcabes and Jones make argue that a client is not a client until he conforms to certain requirements and until he does so he is not a client. This is a useful distinction since Alcabes and Jones go on to highlight this system is applicable to a wide variety of human organizations services.In medicine the issue of non-compliance, that is a patient that is not following a treatment protocol and hence is labelled as non-compliant, uncooperative or a difficult patient is placed in the non client category according to this scheme and thus it has wide application. Essentially a client in order to become a client has to undergo a number of steps. A potential client must first have a problem that society at large recognises is in need of some kind of help.Then the field to which he takes his problem must have the technology to help his problem.After that the potential client must have some kind of support system to provide support durin his treatment and finally the potential client must recognis the authority of the person charged to help him and commit to following a treatment protocol. When these four requirements are met then the potential client is a client. . (Jones, and Alcabes xix) Jones and Alcabes outline a useful process that is widely used in human service organizations and applies to the approach taken at the Department of Public Social Services. They outline three stage process that leads the potential client to the the position of client. First the client goes through the “applicant”stage where help is sought for what is a recognised problem where help is potentially available. Then the potential client enters the “novitiate phase” where the expectations of the treatment or professional help are outlined to the potential client in order to gain relief. Finally after this stage the potential client becomes the client and undertakes the treatment in question. (Jones, and Alcabes xix) According this classification the Department of Public Social Services uses a similar scheme since it is universally applied blueprint of human service organisations. Classification of clients according to this scheme in this is inclusive based typically on compliance with the requirements of being client. This in itself is important but the reasons for this failure to uphold the role of the client deserves further examination based as it is on a myriad of factors.This failure can occur at each and every level that Jones and Alcabes have outlined. During the applicant phase of the potential client the first challenge is arriving at a mutually agreed definition of the problem that is being experienced and needing remedy. In the Department of Public Social Services this is not always easily achieved. There can be differing interpretations of the location of the problem : "What a wife views as alcoholism, her husband may define as the constant nagging of an overly tense woman. And, what the worker may come to regard as an overprotective father, the child may see as her own lack of appreciation for his sacrifices on her behalf" (Jones, and Alcabes 69) . Defining the problem therefore means generally asking open ended questions to elicit the full description of the patients perspective – a strategy that is used in medicine at the beginning of the inteview to get the patient complaints from a broadest initial vantage. Applicants at this point are often labelled. “Gitterman ( 1991) observes that there are four types of applicants: those who seemingly seek out help on their own; those who are referred by other social service agencies; those whom the agency recruits for a program it offers; and those for whom services are legally mandated. The first are customarily referred to as voluntary clients, the second are often labeled referrals, the third are members of an outreach program, and the fourth are known as mandated clients. Many voluntary applicants, however, are coerced into seeking help” (Jones, and Alcabes 74) Glitterman's schema is useful since it reveals the motivation of the potential clients. In our experience at the Department of Public Social Service applicants that aggree with their labels are more likely to be the ones that seek out help and those who resist and are less likely to become clients are those that are legally mandated or otherwise coerced into the situation.The difficulty with these individuals lies in the difficulty in defining a problem which a requisite step in moving beyond the applicant stage. For example a legally mandated individual sent to receive treatment of alchol abuse as part of a requirement for infraction of a law may not be at the point where he considers that he has a problem. Sometimes the potential client may be placed in a situation where the referring agency may be placing in a presumptive category based on the operating principles of the agency . “we described the rush to treatment which characterizes much of the processing of clients. Providing services is the raison d' être of agencies. Hence, there are expectations that the worker will "get on with it." Starting with an applicant provokes infinite variations of one worker's lament: "There is some validity to Kevin's perception that I am pushing him to admit a problem. I am feeling pressured by the agency, by the Department of Motor Vehicles, by Kevin's probation officer, and finally by Kevin himself to label the problem and make appropriate treatment recommendations, if any” (Jones, and Alcabes 85) To be fair to the referral agencies potential clients can present with multiple problems and then the difficultyis narrowing the focus based on the most signifigant problems addressed first.Still this is one of the ways in which a potential client is labelled as difficult. Once the problem is defined a mutually agreed upon set of goals should be outlined. If the the goals are agreed upon the potential client is ready to move on to the novitiate stage. The novitiate stage entails the potential client recognising the authority of the professional charged with treating him. This is a two way process where the professional is best served by providing the the novitiate a full understanding of the treatment process in question, its aims, its limitations. Full disclosure is required since like the idea of informed consent in medicine the novitiate is not only entitled to all the information but also it best serves the course of treatment since it engenders trust. For some, this sort of freedom is a way out of the agreedment and practice they will have variable motivations for not fufilling the requirments of a novitiate but a breach of this process removes him from consideration as a client under the requirements we have already defined.This stage is not an easy process for the professional. Novitiates that decline to treatment as they are entitled to do so can reflect badly on the professional who failed to convert them to clients and this may be the reason for the emotionally charged casual references to bad client, or difficult client. "At the same time, the failure of the worker to convince a person in need of help to accept that help may raise doubts about her competence in her own and supervisor's minds" (Jones, and Alcabes 123) The novitiate is said to have been socialized to become a client once he has accepted the the authority of the professional that will treat him. According to the schema we have been examining this process of being a client is a continued process and along the way if jeapordized will change the status of the individual from client to non- client. The whole nature of the approach to clients had also been signifgantly influenced by the different styles of management human service organisations in recent years. “The advent of 'managerialism' has also fundamentally altered the organisational contexts in which social workers and human service practitioners operate. Managerialism has seen a marked paradigm shift away from traditional professional values to embrace instead business principles such as efficiency and effectiveness, and practices like cost-benefit analysis and strategic planning” (Jones and May, 1992) (Lonne 283) These principles have it seems narrowed the definitions of client according to bussiness models and have no doubt contributed to less flexibility in coming to mutualy understood ideas of the problem in the applicant phase. These influences have significantly impacted on the ways in which services are delivered, as they have been accompanied by expanded policy directives, decreased professional autonomy, increased accountability, altered ethical values, creeping proceduralism within proliferating case management systems, tighter eligibility requirements for service users, and greater emphasis on social compliance and social control (Howe, 1994; Lonne et al., in press; Parton, 1994, 1996; Pottage and Huxley, 1996; Zunz, 1998) (Lonne 283) There are many reasons for labelling clients in a certain way but the schema presented Glitterman allows a certain universallity to the problem and it does apply to the Department of Public Social Services. Works Cited Jones, James A., and Abraham Alcabes. Client Socialization: The Achilles' Heel of the Helping Professions. Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1993. Questia. 27 Mar. 2006 . Lonne, Robert L. "Chapter Eleven Social Workers and Human Service Practitioners." Occupational Stress in the Service Professions. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003. 281-309. Questia. 27 Mar. 2006 . Read More