Accomplishing social work identity in interprofessional mental health teams following the implementation of the Mental Health Act 2007

The main objective of the thesis was to explore how social work Approved Mental Health Professionals accomplished social work identity when seconded to Mental Health Trusts. The project has examined the identity work that the social workers engaged in as they located themselves within interprofessional interagency community mental health teams. Insights from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have been used to examine the interview data. Following Wieder (1974), the findings chapters are presented in two parts. In the first part, the focus is on the interviews as a resource and thus there is a more traditional reporting of what the social workers talked about in the interviews. Throughout the interviews, the social workers were concerned to delineate what was ‘real’ social work. Real social work was depicted as involving autonomous work in the community with mental health service users; this is the ‘authentic realm of social work’ (Pithouse 1998 p.21). Social work identity was portrayed as intrinsic to the self with congruence between personal and professional identity and values. However, the social workers struggled to define social work. Instead of having a clearly defined role, social work was depicted as intangible; as being without clear margins and boundaries, filling in the gaps left by other professions. Notions of ‘dirty work’ (Hughes 1948) and the implications of being seconded to a Health Trust are also discussed. The analytic focus shifts in the second part to the interview as a topic, specifically to how social work identity was accomplished within the interview as interaction. Matters such as being a member, the part played by the use of humour in the interviews, and the interaction as a research interview are explored. Finally, there is an examination of how social work identity was accomplished through the telling of atrocity stories