Covid-19: Can This Pandemic Trigger Innovation in Social Work Practice in Slovenia and England?

We discuss how social workers manage the delivery of practice in Slovenia and England, in response to the emergence of Covid-19. We considered: the impact of Covid-19 on social work practice in our two countries and changes by social workers to the use of virtual media and the physical space in response to the pandemic. We discuss if the response to this crisis has the potential in Slovenia to facilitate processes of deinstitutionalisation and explore the potential role of social work in England extending in its role in the community following the pandemic.


Introduction
In the past year, since the Coronavirus, known as Covid-19, emerged, our lives have changed in dramatic ways because of the government response to the pandemic. Over the last year, the media reports the shocking data of those who are affected, who have died, and moreover how quickly the virus is spreading around the world.
Slovenia is a country with a population of only 2 million; yet on 021.08.21 there were 4781 recorded deaths during the period of the pandemic [1]. The UK is a country of approximately 60 million people; on 04.09.21 (Gov.uk 04.09.21) the number of confirmed deaths recorded in the UK, as a result of the pandemic, was 156,119.
Thus, the pandemic has impacted the lives of individuals, families, groups, communities, and institutions.
As governments internationally have responded to the pandemic, we have witnessed the lockdown of factories, schools, retail outlets, and health and social care services; the national and international reactions to contain the spread of virus have resulted in citizens being compelled to practise social distancing with other people [2]. This action not only creates a physical distance but also a social distance from our wider families, friends and community.
In this current environment of social distancing, people, regardless of whether they use social care services, experience more social isolation and decreased social contact, which impacts on the wellbeing of vulnerable adults and children.
We are both social workers, working as academics in Slovenia and England. The response of both governments in our two countries to Covid-19 has forced us to adapt our working habits and routines; and we have been compelled to adjust to the new circumstances as private and working lives merge whilst the place of family responsibilities and childcare impinge on work roles. In this article we focus on the impact of this pandemic on social work in our respective countries. We consider how this difficult situation, and the national and international reactions to this pandemic, have made social work practice reshape itself in response to the pandemic.
We explore how this situation poses an opportunity for innovation to revise the care and support provided by social workers in both virtual and physical settings. This is a useful approach as Slovenia is a former communist state, which became independent in 1991; and since that time, has made steady but cautious progress toward an open market economy, joining the European Union in 2004. Care is predominantly providing through total institutions [3,4]. Moreover England, as part of the UK, has a neoliberal economy, which impacts on the delivery of its public services, and the whole UK left the European Union at the end of 2019 [5]. We conclude by questioning whether the current economic status of our countries following months of lockdown may limit service improvement by introducing innovation without change [6].

Process of Reflection
From March 2020 until the middle December 2020, we exchanged our views and shared the situations as they unfolded in each of our countries. We reflected on the responses to Covid-19 experienced in our separate countries and organised the ideas into a comprehensive whole that showed the changes in our local and national environments. We formulated our main research questions to guide the development of the discussion in this article: In England, social workers continue to undertake multiprofessional partnership working, assessing and safe-guarding vulnerable adults and children, but they must conduct risk assessments focusing on their own health and safety before undertaking their work. BASW [11,12] highlights the need to limit face-to-face meetings and to maintain social distancing whilst undertaking necessary legislative safeguarding; and BASW [11,12] underlines the importance of wearing personal protective equipment whilst conducting such face-to-face assessments. Thus, in response to this situation, in order to assist people, who use services, safely, social workers have adapted the way they care for vulnerable adults and children, but also maintain their own personal health and safety, utilising more connections in the virtual spaces rather than through traditional face-to-face contact.
In both countries, social workers have increasingly used technology to undertake remote assessments to fulfil their legislative duties. Virtual contacts enable elders in care homes to see and hear their sons and daughters on telephones and I-pads; and ICT is utilised to undertake risk assessment and safe-guarding meetings with children and families and vulnerable adults. However, although we acknowledge the potential role of ICT in supporting Despite this, social work in the virtual world, has many benefits such as enabling people with learning needs to review video materials in advance; and, furthermore, online meetings provide more opportunities to 'talk' via chat or oral media. This approach promotes opportunities for service users to communicate in diverse ways and enables those with visual or hearing impairments to become active participants in online meetings [16].
Although the use of the virtual space can solve many dilemmas during the Covid-19 by enabling limited forms of virtual communications, we believe that social work cannot only take place in the virtual space. Interpersonal connections are therefore essential in the personal interaction that take place in the physical space; and even more so, physical contact was especially missing in care given to older people. From our process of duo ethnography, we identified changes taking place in the physical space in our local environments of Slovenia and England, and then reflected on the commonalities and differences in the wider international context.
Firstly, we focus on Slovenia and then on changes in England.

The Potential for Change in The Physical Space
In Slovenia, many changes to practice have been implemented on is committed to providing services in the community, however the gradual retrenchment of the state [22] and cuts to public spending [23,24] following the financial crisis of 2008, have resulted in the reduction of community services such as day centres, meals on wheels, and community transport [25] This episode of recession led to an emphasis on the rationing of resources to only those with the highest need [26] as the government sought to reduce funding to publicly funded services by rolling back the state [22].
This may indicate that even when service delivery is implemented through care in the community, a visionary form of provision [26] that Slovenia seeks to emulate, reductions in funding may lead to challenges in organizing effective, safe, and reliable care.
Moreover, the enactment of wellbeing has been a guiding focus in legislation for the provision of services for children and families [27] and adults in the community [5]; however, many have questioned the liberating promises of the [5] with its focus on wellbeing in the context of a period of austerity (Whittaker 2016) This meant that an increase in wellbeing was not experienced by many service users; and if deinstitutionalisation is introduced in Slovenia, without adequate preparation and care, then the opportunity found in Covid-19 pandemic to innovate services may fail.
Learning further from the UK, shows that although this country has embraced the process of deinstitutionalisation and adopted care in the community since the early 1980s [25], in contrast to Slovenia, many mini-institutions in the UK still continue to deliver total care in residential settings. Questions have been raised about the quality of support delivered in such establishments, as documented by an under-cover reporter in 2012 [28]. The dangerous care provided in a residential home called Winterbourne View was revealed and the physical and emotional abuse of its residents who had learning difficulties was highlighted. Furthermore, although the UK has ostensibly moved to care in the community, such mini-institutions continue to exist and conceal poor levels of care. [17] also suggests a similar situation in Slovenia exists; she notes that even when people were move from the institutions to the group homes, which support people with mental ill health, continue to exist as mini-institutions.
Her research shows that in Slovenia, workers, including social workers, continue to work with an institutional mentality.
This situation suggests that England has still some way to go to deliver safe care, and perhaps reveals the long way that Slovenia must traverse to achieve change. We thus consider that we need to be cautious about the hopes raised to change and innovate care provision in the context of Covid-19; we need to be aware of the dramatic adjustments which will be required to instigate service improvement. Despite this, care in the community is a less expensive form of care than institutionalised care [6], which suggests the potential for its implementation; however, both political will and community-led activism will be needed to implement such change.
Moreover, with the slow-down in both national and international economic communities, reductions in government finance due to Covid-19 will limit the potential for change and the government's will to focus on national changes to systems of social care. We now move to explore the potential of community-led services and the implications for social work.

Community Space: The Place of Social Work?
In the wider context of Europe, in response to the pandemic, many local organisations in Slovenia, England and elsewhere have mobilised to offer both practical and emotional support to people who are either self-isolating or shielding themselves because of their vulnerability to Covid-19 [8,29,30]. This community action is organic rather than structural, it is bottom-up rather than top-down [31] and is not initiated by government or national administrations. In the remainder of the article, we suggest that social workers have the potential skills and capabilities to contribute effectively to the development of such community initiatives [3,31,32] as they respond to the pandemic.
Community Social Work (CSW) has its roots in the socioecological model [33], in which intervention is centred on change to the social networks around a person to build their social capital rather than change focused on the individual him/herself, a theory at the center of social work. It requires a change in focus from person-centred care to investment in communities and mutual aid [34]. This process of mutual aid and community building as communities seek to self-organize and support people is a natural place for social workers to occupy.
The emergence of Covid-19 has challenged the narrow role of the social workers in our respective countries as communities mobilize to meet the needs of vulnerable people [30]. Currently, It is important to acknowledge that the social work profession has a history of supporting mutual aid and community development [34]. Social workers' commitment to social justice and support for service user empowerment [32] suggest the potential for their effective involvement in such processes. However, the wider impact of political recession [31] and the limits on the role of social workers, particularly in the UK [34], suggest that social workers will need to carve out a new niche for themselves to ensure their participation in service change and community activism. In Slovenia, care for older and disabled people is dominated by a rigid system of institutions, which do not meet the needs of the heterogeneous group of older people [4], and the lack of community-based care is one of the persistent problems obstructing the development of care for older people; we therefore believe that the pandemic presents an opportunity to innovate towards more user-centred practice. In England, social work may have the potential to develop a stronger presence in the community.

Conclusion
We believe that social workers respond in creative ways to all those changes during the pandemic and that social care practitioners in our local and international contexts have the knowledge and skills to drive service improvement.
In the future, we are hesitant about the potential for change; we fear that disappointingly 'innovation without change' [6] may reign as we reconfigure health and social care services in response to Covid-19. The slowdown in the international economies has led to shrinking international funds and national Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This will impact inevitably on the resources available for the development and delivery of future health and social care services, and the amount of support offered to social workers.
Although the development of CSW and community mobilisation suggest the potential for change, it may be that the opportunities for innovation are lost due to financial expediency and the sense of hope and optimism for the potential for change following this terrible pandemic will be dashed. Moreover, if a second wave of the pandemic were to occur, social workers would need to reassess their response and early moves to re-establish contact in the physical space, would need to be retrenched as virtual connections are re-instituted and face-to-face contacts restricted [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51].