This paper explores the importance of service strategies in social services. The social service landscape in Singapore was also used during the discussion of some of the strategies. The paper listed two direct service strategies which clients could benefit as social service professionals attempt to find the causality to the clients' issues.
Service Strategies of Social Services.
Social service professionals traditionally use a series of steps or processes to help clients resolve their problems. These steps include building a relationship among the worker, the client, and the client's environment (engagement), collecting information about the client (assessment), making sense out of the information (diagnosis), doing of the work that will enable the client and the practitioner to accomplish the goal decided upon in the assessment (intervention) and determining whether the process has been helpful (evaluation). However, this process rarely follows a precise linear route and is more often a fluid circular process whereby the professionals may move from assessment through to intervention and evaluation and back to assessment again. An essential element of the social work process is the selection of intervention methods, informed by psychological and sociological theories, and social work assessments. Through skills of observation and assessment social service professionals are able to analyse and explain situations, develop hypotheses about potential outcomes, and select intervention methods to achieve desired results.
Done in various settings, social service professionals designed the interventions with the intent to be purposeful and efficient (Mandell & Schram, 2012). These interventions are aimed to help solve some if not all of the clients' issues. With this in mind, social service professionals understood that they ought to find the cause, design a rational plan to solve the problem and then match the solutions to the cause or problems (Mandell & Schram, 2012).
