Social Work, Disabled Service Users and Digital Communication Technology: A Practice Guide

This Practice Guide comes from research undertaken by Disabled lay researchers, supported by Shaping Our Lives and academics at King’s College London in partnership with BASW. Genuine co-production is still unusual: often talked about but, in the real world, much harder to deliver. However, in the case of this research, genuine co-production has run throughout the project from beginning to end.

Rather than university researchers or social workers interviewing Disabled people and then writing up the findings, in this research Disabled people interviewed social workers and Disabled social work service users, and then they wrote up the findings. The findings were shared simultaneously with both Disabled service users and social workers, who decided how best to interpret the findings and make recommendations.