with a particular interpretation of what a family’s diffi culties might be. It’s a much more creative way of working.’ Another key diff erence in approach is the use of systemic family therapy. The clinician in Maggie’s unit is a qualifi ed family therapist and each of the social workers is receiving extensive training in the discipline. ‘Systemic family therapy is an ideal core
model to be bringing in to social work,’ says Maggie. ‘Some of us have always thought theoretically or therapeutically about the way we work with families but we would do it in a fragmented way. This brings us together with a common language and approach.’ Having immediate access to a specialist
family therapist also allows interventions to be based on family systems theory. ‘We used to get so frustrated that we
couldn’t make referrals to CAMHS for family therapy,’ says Maggie. ‘Now we can decide at our Wednesday morning meeting and just
do it. Some of the barriers to creative and appropriate interventions are gone and we can just get on with it.’ ‘For example, we are working with a family
where we are running family therapy sessions and the social workers provide what’s called the refl ecting team.’ Other techniques such as ‘hypothesising’
are used to investigate the dynamics of struggling families. ‘The idea of hypothesising is that you
generate a lot of possible thoughts about what might be happening,’ says Maggie. ‘You can hypothesise crazy thoughts as well as very sound careful thoughts and you put them all into the pot. This means you don’t get stuck with a particular interpretation of what’s going on. All these diff erent ideas begin to coalesce and consolidate into the ones that resonate most. The unit model lends itself to this very well.’ ‘It also allows us to invite the family to