What are the challenges faced by social workers who have to deal with potential clients referred by others? What are the ways in which social workers can be sensitive to such clients?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

When potential clients have been referred by others, these clients will need to be reassured that their wishes are important and that they do not necessarily have to work on the concerns seen by the referral source. Such clients frequently have misgivings about the helping process. They do not perceive themselves as having a problem and often attribute the source of difficulties to another person or to untoward circumstances.
Such clients face social workers with several challenging tasks:

neutralizing negative feelings.
attempting to help potential clients understand problems identified by others and assessing the advantages and disadvantages of dealing with those concerns.
creating an incentive to work on acknowledged problems and identifying goals.
Social workers should voice a belief in clients' abilities to work as partners in searching for remedial courses of action and mobilize clients' energies in implementing the tasks essential to successful problem resolution. It is important that social workers delineate the difference between the tasks and the goal; often, clients become overwhelmed with the tasks although they agree with the goal.

When using a strengths-based approach, it is necessary to identify not just concerns but also what things are going well in the client's life in order to highlight current coping mechanisms.

One very useful strategy is to acknowledge the client's problem and explicitly recognize the client's motivation to actively work toward its solution. Phrasing the solution as a goal will help differentiate the goal from tasks.