ABSTRACT
Unlike assessing, planning and intervening, service outcomes are not a phase within the social work process, but a consequence, product or effect, either planned or unintended. They are associated with endings, whether of success, failure or ambiguity. As such they involve disengaging, giving a decent burial, conserving beneficial results, conducting various administrative tasks, evaluating the process and task achievements of the service users, and private and public aspects of evaluating the practitioner. Yet it is deeply mistaken to think that outcomes are solely manifested as endings. At the risk of repetition, distinctions between assessment, planning, intervention and outcomes are in large part heuristic – devices which enable us to view aspects of practice from different perspectives. The consequences of practice, intended or otherwise, beneficial or harmful, are frequently idiosyncratic, in that they occur gradually, cyclically or separately in time from the period of intervention. 1 the accounts of practitioners with which we started the argument of this book display sensitivity to the complexity of these outcomes and consequences. In other data from the same project, practitioners had much to say about how they judged outcomes. In summary, the factors in Figure 8.1 capture the main motifs of these responses.
