ABSTRACT
The traditional response to bridging these perceived gaps between practice need and social work response is to suggest that it refers to an unmet training need for social workers (Adams, 1999; Shaw & Palattiyil, 2008), and in particular to recommend greater inclusion of alcohol content into qualifying and post-qualifying education provision (Galvani & Hughes, 2010; Livingston, 2013a). Curricula input on alcohol is not a compulsory element in many social work qualifying programmes and its inclusion is very inconsistent (Galvani, Hutchinson, & Dance, 2013). In addition the perceived lack of social work role legitimacy can in part be explained by recent and voluminous political and policy directives on alcohol, which has led alcohol services to be increasingly located within specialist adult (health and criminal justice) treatment orientated provision and away from social work practitioners. In this context, social work education is often seen as generic and alcohol work as specialist (Livingston, 1996, 2013b), with a smaller cohort of authors arguing that good alcohol work is synonymous with good social work (Forrester & Harwin, 2011; Paylor et al., 2012).
