Social Care Online - Case studies

Social care practitioner

Marie Diggins is a duty manager in one of their Community Mental Health Teams (CMHT) at Lewisham Council. She has often used eLSC (now Social Care Online) to look up good practice guidance and articles on adult mental health. "I've used eLSC a lot in the past, especially when I have had a difficult case or when a new kind of treatment or policy has come out. I've found it a really useful way to quickly access journal articles, especially from the more specialist journals, and to find out what people are doing overseas. I'm pleased it's been redeveloped - it was always useful, but needed to be a bit more user-friendly."

Student

Chris Taylor is a second year social work student at the University of West of England and a Rehabilitation Worker with visually impaired people in a local sensory services team.

The new degree course places great emphasis on the teaching of evidence-based practice and requires students to refer to and use a broad range of up-to-date sources within their written assignments. Chris, who is visually impaired, finds accessing printed material such as journals and books difficult and slow. For him, good access to electronic sources of information is important, enabling him to search for relevant and up-to-date articles quickly and efficiently. Chris then uses his computer to 'read' the information to him. Unlike many other electronic sources of information, Social Care Online offers him a range of accessible information wholly relevant to his current studies.

"I've used what was the electronic Library for Social Care (eLSC), now Social Care Online, a lot in my studies and have always found it to be extremely useful and accessible. Now that it's been redeveloped I'm looking forward to it reducing my research time even further, leaving me some time to nip down the local."

Researcher/academic

Lesley Grayson is a Research Fellow at the Economics and Social Research Council UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice at the University of London. One of her key jobs is to pull together information on the debates, policies, applications and techniques of evidence-based policy and practice. The literature is widely scattered, and Lesley has been a keen user of the electronic Library for Social Care (eLSC).

"It's one of the sources I turn to regularly to find out what's going on in evidence-based social care. Its currency is a major plus factor - not many resources are updated every day - and the links it provides to online documents and journal publishers make getting hold of material much easier."

Lesley and her colleagues also use the portal to answer social care enquiries from the centre's 700+ UK and overseas associates, and in advising them on information sources in the field. "Socal Care Online is featured as a resource on the centre's website, and we encourage its use in our information retrieval training sessions for students, researchers and practitioners."