ABSTRACT
Social work has sought, in recent years, to become a more open activity; where the social distance between social worker and client should be reduced, and the client should be more aware and understanding of the professional processes through which help is given. The move to openness can be seen particularly in a developing ideology that where decisions are made which affect clients they should influence those decisions, and that they should have access to personal information about them held in social work records. It would be wise not to exaggerate the extent to which this change has already taken place. Although much is said about ‘shared decision-making’ and ‘access to records’, they probably occur quite rarely in everyday practice. For example, a recently published study designed to promote access to records (Øvretveit 1986) reports active work with eight social work teams to this end; yet only one was routinely sharing records with clients by the completion of the two-year project.
