SI_TimM

From Method to Skills, door Tim Munneke, Maatschappelijk Werk en Dienstverlening

For almost 6 years I’ve worked in different kinds of care facilities, facilities where I worked with teenagers with severe behavioural problems to facilities where I worked with mentally en physically disabled people.

Every facility where I worked has their own method or their own way of thinking on how they have to see different types of problems. In basis that isn’t wrong, to help people you have to define the problem before you can help them with it. But after a while I really saw the downside of this.
How to see the problem and how to work with it became protocolized, a lot of people I saw where so convinced of their method, that they had the answer to the problem because their method said so.

The effect of this all was that clients didn’t get what they needed because the people who should have fit their needs didn’t. For example, a 17 year old girl with a depression lived in a treatment centre, the method of this day centre was: ‘’competentie gericht werken’’. The method says if she learns a specific set of skills her depression would go away, so that’s what we did but her depression wouldn’t go away, her depression became worse and after a few months she became 18 and moved out.

If this problem had another approach we could’ve helped her better.

So, in a nutshell, because of the methods we make a blind spot for ourselves, I want to create a new way of education to solve this problem.