The importance of human relationships

Relationships are crucial to our survival as a human race. They facilitate our reproduction, provide love and a nurturing environment for our development, enhance our life opportunities and extend our survival. However, we don’t all have positive human relationships and this is where social workers can help.

Social workers often intervene when relationships break down or are damaging people. They undertake a variety of roles such as helping to safeguard children witnessing intimate partner violence; finding carers for young refugees without parents; protecting young people being exploited for sex or drug trafficking; or supporting isolated adults to develop new social relationships, for example.

World Social Work Day 2019 highlights the importance of human relationships. This message is important at a time when hatred appears rife and people are divided because of ideology, bigotry and racism. Today, as a social worker, I’d like to celebrate the life-affirming importance of human relationships and encourage the profession to consider how it can do more to promote positive connections between people, friends or even romantic partners.

See relationships

In my role as a social work educator and researcher I see the importance of human relationships every day.

I see students supporting each other in the classroom, sharing their commitment for social change.

I see these students on placement, connecting with and learning from experienced practitioners.

I observe students in their practice, seeing how they are supporting isolated people to connect with others, often when the odds are stacked against them.

I see the team of social work educators I lead coming together to share good practice and address issues of concern.

I see the researchers I supervise connecting with research participants to collect data to help us practice more effectively.

Today we should celebrate the everyday social connections we see around us which help to build our human relationships and make life fulfilling.

Support relationship building

Most of my work at present is concerned with finding better ways to support isolated people with mental health problems to build new relationships. This is what Connecting People is all about.

I see many examples of good practice. For example, a practitioner who has integrated network mapping into routine assessments; a team which has mapped local community networks and resources and connects with them; a project which brings people together to discover more about their local neighbourhood

But this work is often challenging. Bureaucracy, high caseloads and key performance indicators which favour processes rather than outcomes often get in the way of connecting people.

Today is a reminder that we should not give up. Human relationships are important, particularly where they are problematic or absent. Let’s continue to support social workers to connect people with others and build positive human relationships where they are needed the most.