An exploration of social workers’ professional identities within health settings in Queensland
Creators: name: McNamara, Jacqueline
Publisher: name: Central Queensland Univerity
Year: 2018
Subjects: Social work
Health
Australia
Queensland
Professional identity
Sense of self
Reflective practice
Supervision
Psychosocial
Constructivist grounded theory
Neoliberalism
Biopsychosocial
Interpretive-constructivist
Medical dominance

description: Social workers make up a significant number of the professionals and are key members of multidisciplinary teams employed within the health sector in Queensland. Shifting government priorities such as increased governance, managerialism, privatisation and marketisation of the health sector in Queensland are consistently shaping health service delivery. These are subsequently reflected in the delivery of social work services in this context. This has prompted an exploration of how social workers develop and maintain their professional identity when working amidst the presence of medical dominance and evolving neoliberal ideology that underpin the operation of health services within Queensland. In adopting a paradigm of exploratory qualitative research, this thesis explores the everyday lived experience of nine social workers within health settings in Queensland. Drawing on an epistemological position of social constructivism, this thesis interprets how the lived experience contributes to the social construction of social work professional identity within the health sector in Queensland. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were undertaken with nine social workers employed within health settings across Queensland and were analysed with the use of grounded theory analytical framework. It was found that the participants attributed their social work values, alongside corresponding skills, knowledge and theory, as the foundation of their envisioned professional identities as social workers in the health context. This identified that the participants relied on a congruence between both the personal and professional sense of self in constructing their social work identities. Further, it was discovered that the participants’ everyday experience of actuating their envisioned professional social work identity is stymied by the socio-political influence and heavily medicalised ideology prevalent within the health system in Queensland. This experience contributed to a significant number of the participants contending that their professional identity is not valued by the health system and that they experience a dissonance in applying their unique social work identities to the health system’s expectations of the social work role. A substantive theory was developed. The theory posits that the concept of ‘passion’, is paramount in developing and sustaining the unique social work identities of the participants in this study. Underpinning this theory were findings that explain the process in which passion for social work is denigrated for the participants within the health context. Due to their identities assuming a dichotomous influence of ideologies, it was interpreted that this ensues a fragmentation of the potential for an articulate and robust unique professional identity for health-employed social workers. This challenge was found to predispose to experiences of job dissatisfaction and burn-out and to encompass an overall loss of passion for the development and maintenance of the participants’ unique social work identity within the health context in Queensland.