Ethical challenges of social work in Spain during COVID-19

Abstract

This article presents the main ethical challenges faced by social work professionals in Spain during the "first wave" of COVID-19 in 2020. The pandemic had a serious impact not only on the health sector, but also in the field of social work. During this time, social workers had to address serious ethical questions regarding issues such as confidentiality breaches, how to fairly distribute available resources, the lack of personal contact and emotional connection with the service users, the difficulties of working in isolation and online, doubts about the reliability of the information they were handling and the difficulty of making proper diagnoses. An international research group led by Dr. Sara Banks conducted a broader research project in collaboration with the International Federation of Social Workers, which collected information through an online questionnaire aimed at social workers from various countries. In this article we analyse the results related to the main ethical challenges faced by social workers in Spain. The research group identified two types of ethical challenges that they have separated into two sections: the first section is related to direct intervention with users, which includes topics such as the lack of emotional support, reliability, use of technology, the appropriate care, compliance with the highest professional standards, confidentiality, vulnerability, and the fair distribu-tion of resources. The other section is related to the ethical challenges around the daily work within social entities, which involved dealing with issues such as the e-social work and coordination difficulties, the management of pressure in social bodies and changes in the intervention methodology.

Keywords: Social work ethics, pandemic, international research, COVID