ABSTRACT
The challenge of teamwork in general practice and the questioning attitudes amongst colleagues at the National Institute led to changes in the social worker's approach. It soon became apparent that the usual social work recording methods, consisting of narrative accounts of varying completeness, would not yield comparative data on all the clients the social worker was seeing. The difficulties encountered in recording and analysing information relating to on-going social work were much greater than anticipated. Although the social worker found the discipline of standardised recording irksome at times, as the project went on, she became an enthusiastic supporter of statistics as a way of monitoring social work. The recording system could not have been kept up as efficiently without the social worker's part-time secretary who made sure that the index cards were completed and who transferred the information to coding sheets.
