ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the legal and historical framework for social work practice in the UK and identifies some areas of collaboration between social work and primary care. Social work is built on the ethos of collaboration between professionals and service users, between teams, across services and within communities. The relationship between social workers and primary care is predicated on the legal and statutory framework that social work operates within. The most obvious way to describe areas of collaboration between social work and primary care is focusing on the main client groups social workers engage with and then draw out the relationship to primary care. The social work role with older people and its link to primary care is of relevance. The National Association of Primary Care identifies the ‘primary care home’ as another model of bringing together primary care and social care.
