A course in collaboration for social workers and general practitioners.

Patients have overlapping social and medical needs, yet social workers and doctors often have problems in working together to help with them. We planned a short experimental course which was to look at this situation and to help members of both professions learn about each other. This was to encourage attitudes of mutual trust and respect in order to promote future collaboration.The social workers had all qualified within the past year and were working in their first appointment, based either in the community or in a hospital. The doctors were training to become general practitioners and were either members of a three-year vocational training programme or were working in a one-year attachment in local practices.Each session started and ended with the whole course together, but the core of each meeting was case discussion among small mixed groups. In this way social workers and doctors were able to explore together mutual problems of patient care.