Samverkan är inte en frivillighetsgrej, utan det ingår i vårt arbete helt enkelt.

Abstract

How do you do co-operation between government agencies? It is a wide spread view that there can be quite a few hitches in co-operation between agencies. In later years this idea has spread to the media where there has been negative coverage of the social service agencies. This generally applies to cases where children suffer because the right assistance takes too long to co-ordinate or does not get co-ordinated at all between schools, healthcare and social services. The social welfare law dictates that it is the social welfare office duty to co-ordinate the government agencies for the child’s best interest. This made us consider what we in fact know about “how to do co-operation”. We choose to focus on co-operation between the schools and social welfare offices in our essay. This led us to interview three social workers working with kids and their families in three different social welfare offices. We asked them what knowledge they had about co-operation, what obstacles they had met and what factors had proven vital for their co-operation with other agencies. In order to look into what knowledge social workers have about co-operation we then interviewed teachers at the department of social work at Gothenburg University. We then compared these statements to those of the social workers. We found a number of similarities, such as the importance of superiors, communication and respect for the other professions in order to co-operate successfully. Furthermore we learnt that though there is imperfections in practice and the study of co-operation at the department of social work, it does provide students with the basic knowledge of co-operation. Considering further research, a focus on how to bring together students from different departments in co-operation would be beneficiary for co-operation between professionals. Given more time we would also consider looking at different theoretical perspectives when it comes to analyzing co-operation.