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The Role Of A Social Worker

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Introduction
Law has come to play a very important part in social work practice. It can be said that the understanding of law underpins and provides duties and power, whilst understanding the statutory legal requirements is essential for effective, fair, anti-discriminatory practice (Brammer 2007). Due to the shear amount of laws and legislation that have been passed or updated over the last decade, the role of the social worker, metaphorically speaking could be said to have become somewhat of a chameleon, forever adapting to their legal environment, whilst trying hard to remain true to the traditional values of the role of a social worker. It is this conflict between law and social work values that will be analyzed in this paper. From looking at the values that underpin the modern day social worker and then looking at some of the main legislation relating to adult services such as the Mental Health Act 2007, the Community Care Act 1996, Mental Capacity Act 2005 the relationship between these Acts’ and how they sit with social work values will then be discussed.
1.1 The Key Values and Ethics of the Social Worker
Values and ethics are sets of beliefs and principles that have an important role to play in terms of providing guide to action, offering a framework for making sense of a given situation in practice, providing a yardstick by which to judge the appropriateness of a given action whilst also sustaining a social worker through difficult, discouraging times (Thompson

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