Strengthening knowledge-guided practice

Abstract

Social workers and other human services workers are increasingly required to justify their decisions based upon defendable knowledge. This paper describes an innovative process that was employed to facilitate knowledge-guided practice among human service workers in child protection. The process incorporated the running of training workshops with time limited follow-up support, at the workplace level, on significant practice topics. In addition to describing the process, we identify salient principles of the workshop and mentoring processes that could be incorporated into ongoing professional development programs. Throughout, the paper is informed by our own reflections on the implementation of workshops with child protection workers and comments received from workshop participants in relation to the benefits and challenges of strengthening knowledge-guided practice in the workplace.