# 4.2 Human rights and professional practice

You are now going to consider the implications of human rights for professional practice. Social care professionals have key responsibilities for the welfare of service users and carers and are also required to respect their rights. These responsibilities may coincide where individuals actively seek services or consent to their protection, but they can also conﬂict where the individual’s interpretation of their own interests does not coincide with the professional’s view. It is in these situations that the discretion and power of the social care professional are most apparent, and the rights of service users must be considered.

Working with service users in a way that promotes partnership and empowers them is, therefore, a crucial aspect of social care professional practice:

> A human rights based approach is about empowering people to know and claim their rights and increasing the ability and accountability of individuals and institutions who are responsible for respecting, protecting and fulfilling rights. This means giving people greater opportunities to participate in shaping the decisions that impact on their human rights. It also means increasing the ability of those with responsibility for fulfilling rights to recognise and know how to respect those rights, and make sure they can be held to account.

(BASW, 2015, p. 7)

Empowerment and education are important parts of a human-rights-based approach to social care professional practice. It is also clear that social care professional practice, if it is to satisfy value requirements and respect principles of human rights and social justice, must not stigmatise or disadvantage individuals, groups or communities. As part of a human-rights-based approach to social care professional practice, social care professionals have an important role in helping service users to understand their legal rights, identifying when those rights may have been breached, and helping service users to seek legal help or advice or take the first steps towards challenging those breaches.

The next section explores the responsibilities of social care professionals and how they can be held accountable.

OpenLearn - Introducing social care and social work
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.