Vad prioriteras i den allt mer specialiserade socialtjänsten? - En kvalitativ studie om socialsekreterares syn på organiseringen och möjligheten att skapa de relationer de eftersträvar.

Sammanfattning: How to best organize the social services unit of individual and family care (IFO) has been in question since the 1980ies. Two principal ways of organization have been used, called integrated and specialized organization. In an integrated organization, the social secretary works with all parts of the clients' problem picture. This structure used to be the norm but is today only employed by a few municipalities in Sweden. The specialized structure has evolved to become the dominant work organization, where each social secretary is responsible for a specific part of a clients' case. Whereas the workers may become more competent within their area of expertise, the division has proven to create a distance between social secretaries and clients. The organization does not give the workers opportunity to work with the complete problematic picture, thereby directing the professionals towards a lower grade of care for the client and making it harder to establish a firm relationship to build from. The purpose of this study was to examine social secretaries view of the organization of two specialized social services organizations that work with financial assistance. Furthermore, a goal of this paper was also to examine if the social secretaries believe that a relationship with the client has importance for the social work within financial assistance and if the organization gives the social secretaries opportunity to create the relationship they aspire with the client. The study was conducted through a qualitative research method where six social secretaries were interviewed for the study. The results from the study demonstrated that the employees in municipality A work with all the parts regarding each client and those in municipality B had their work tasks divided between different employees and were more specialized. In municipality A the interviewees believed that the benefit of the organization is that you get a complete picture of the client and the disadvantage is that you only have time to prioritize the monthly applications. I municipality B the interviewees believed that the benefit of the organization is that they can focus on working with the client and do not need to spend time on making the monthly applications and the disadvantage of the organization is that they may miss information about the client since the work tasks are divided. The interviewees in both municipality A and B believe that the relationship has a great importance for the work with social work within financial assistance and most of them think the organisations do not give the social secretaries opportunity to create the relationship with the client they aspire.