ABSTRACT
Social workers in health settings are exceptionally well placed to contribute to building the knowledge base for practice. Their daily engagement with people encountering health problems that impact their psychosocial wellbeing enables social workers to gain insight into the potential impact of social work interventions, whether these be in relation to clinical issues, policy matters/community factors. Social workers work from a perspective founded in person-in-environment. A number of models have been advanced describing a range of ways in which practitioners may engage in building the knowledge and evidence base for social work. Within social work, academic/research partnerships have been introduced in different countries and into a number of different settings and have taken a variety of forms. Social workers with less practice experience reported that complex clients presented more challenges than they did to social workers with greater experience. Practice research is research in context, just as social work practice is itself contextualised, exemplified by social work's person-in-environment focus.
