Ethical decision-making of social workers in Spain during COVID-19: Cases and responses

Abstract

In this article we address the ethical decision-making processes of social work professionals in Spain during the first wave of COVID-19. We present some of the findings from a broader international research project led by professor Sarah Banks and carried out in collaboration with the International Federation of Social Workers. The first wave of COVID-19 had a major impact in Spain, hitting harder the most vulnerable groups. In this unprecedented and unexpected context, social workers had to make difficult ethical decisions on fundamental issues such as respecting service-user’s autonomy, prioritizing wellbeing, maintaining confidentiality or deciding the fair distribution of the scarce resources. There were moments of uncertainty and difficult institutional responses. The broader international project was carried out using an online questionnaire addressed to social work professionals in several countries. In this article, through several specific cases, we examine the ethical decision-making processes of social work professionals in Spain, as well as the way to resolve that situations. We have used a qualitative content analysis with a deductive approach to analyze the responses and cases. Findings show many difficult situations concerning the prioritization of the wellbeing of users without limiting their autonomy, the invention of new organizational protocols to provide support and resources for vulnerable people… Social workers had to manage the bureaucracy and had to solve some emergency situations getting personally involved or developing other cooperation mechanisms. The pandemic forced them to look for new forms of social intervention.