Exploring how social workers experience and cope with public perception of their profession

The public’s perception of the social work profession is a rarely considered perspective, and yet a topic that is a concern to front Thepublic’sperceptionofthesocialworkprofessionisararelyconsideredperspective and yet a topic that is a concern to front line professionals. This paper explores how social workers experience and attempt to cope with public perception of their profession. It highlights the impact of these concerns on social workers’ personal experiences and professional practice. Using semi-structured interviews with sixteen UK social workers, from local authorities and private organisations,we explore the experiences of this group.Thematic analysis of the data identified four concerns: the experience of public perception, drivers of public perception, coping with public perception, and mechanisms to raise the professions profile. Examining public perception through the eyes of social workers provides valuable insights into the lived experiences of these professionals, and offers practical implications at both the micro and macro levels. It reveals two key ways in which the profession can begin to address the prevailing negative perception considered to be emanating from the public: through developing a more co-operative relationship with external sources of public perception (e.g. government and the media) and by engaging in more pro-active self-promotion of the service.

Trans-language, trans-culture, trans-translation?

The growth of the discipline of translation studies has been accompanied by are newed reflection on the object of research and our metalanguage. These developments have also been necessitated by the diversification of professions within the language industry. The very label translation is often avoided in favour of alternative terms, such as localisation (of software), trans creation (of advertising), trans editing (of information from press agencies). The competences framework developed for the European Master’s in Translation network speaks of experts in multilingual and multimedia communication to account for the complexity of translation competence. This paper addresses the following related questions: (i) How can translation competence in such awide sense be developed in training programmes? (ii) Do some competences required in the industry go beyond translation competence? and (iii) What challenges do labels such as trans creation pose?

The PHAR-QA project: competency framework for pharmacy practice—first steps, the results of the European Network Delphi round 1

PHAR-QA, funded by the European Commission, is producing a framework of competences for pharmacy practice. The framework is in line with the EU directive on sectoral professions and takes into account the diversity of the pharmacy profession and the on-going changes in healthcare systems (with an increasingly important role for pharmacists), and in the pharmaceutical industry. PHAR-QA is asking academia, students and practicing pharmacists to rank competences required for practice. The results show that competences in the areas of drug interactions, need for drug treatment and provision of information and service were ranked highest whereas those in the areas of ability to design and conduct research and development and production of medicines were ranked lower. For the latter two categories, industrial pharmacists ranked them higher than did the other five groups