Lay or/and professional: Those who are affected by the issue from the public

We were motivated to choose as partners some more or less homogenous group of users which face a serious social stigma. As our school has had a good previous collaboration with an established NGO that seeks to support women who experience addiction problems, we decided to start a partnership with the women through this organisation. 

The research evidence highlights how women with addiction problems who are in recovery face issues of social stigma and exclusion which are informed by problematic assumptions about the causes of these problems. For this reason, women with these problems face difficulties in having their experiences and voices heard (Agterberg et al., 2020). Many of the service users have also had negative interactions with social workers. Therefore the co-designed partnership approach set out to help empower the women by allowing their voice to be amplified through their involvement in teaching and assessment. 

A reflective approach was viewed as particularly important in light of the suggestion by Nelson (2012, p. 26) that social workers may find engaging in anti-discriminatory practice 'especially tricky if working with service users who engage in illegal activities like drug taking.' This underpinned this initiative in conjunction with concerns that social workers may feel inadequate when working with drug use issues (Loughran, Hohman, & Finnegan,2010). 

Learning objectives

From the academic teaching team, four aims were formulated: 

• To enable service users to co-design the teaching content and methods.
• To enable service users to be involved in student assessment methods.
• To better prepare qualifying students to understand the views and needs of service users generally, specifically women who have addiction problems and encounter child welfare and protection services.
• To help empower women who have experienced problems with addiction by allowing their lived experience to be shared with the social work students. It was also hoped that through this process, some of the women's own negative perceptions and experiences of social workers could be shifted/changed.

CORU (standards-of-proficiency-for-social-workers.pdf (coru.ie)_

References: Agterberg, S., Schubert, N., Overington, L., & Corace, K. (2020). Treatment barriers among individuals with co-occurring substance use and mental health problems: Examining gender differences. Journal of substance abuse treatment, 112, 29-35.

Nelson, A. (2012). Social work with substance users. London: Sage. 10.4135/9781446288849

Loughran, H., Hohman, M., & Finnegan, D. (2010). Predictors of role legitimacy and role adequacy of social workers working with substance-using clients. British Journal of Social Work, 40, 239–256. 10.1093/bjsw/bcn106