Information Gathering and Social Work
Advances in information technology allow increasingly new and invisible applications of information. This includes matching information about individuals across large databases which may be local or national in scope. This topic is of interest to social workers globally because increasingly we ask service users to waive rights of privacy to access welfare service; this is particularly the case in income support delivery.
This presentation will argue that the profession of social work, both globally and across practice areas, needs a framework to evaluate how information gathering and matching infringes the human rights of social work service users. If social work does not have such a framework we cannot have input into the design of information gathering systems; which will then continue to be designed and implemented without the input of social work ethics and values.
Further,this presentation will also argue that, in the absence of such a framework, social workers need to continually question information gathering both in their practice and within their organization in order to promote and maximise the rights of service users.