Social Work in the Year 2000. Amid increasing poverty, homelessness, cuts in government spending, drug misuse, AIDS and family violence, the professional social worker has emerged: a faceless bureaucrat backed by endless committees, an administrator allocating limited resources on the basis of computerized checklists and needs assessments. Community Care served up with a dash of psychotherapy and counseling in a society where community does not exist and nobody really cares.

Social work has become a relatively lucrative career - while its moral mission has almost been forgotten.

It is time to go back to basic essentials. Fr. Felix Biestek's life and work exemplifies both the positive humane value of social work and the approach and techniques of a social work practice that puts the client's needs first. His book The Casework Relationship first published in 1957, clearly spells out the need to treat persons as unique individuals, and of the importance of the client-social worker relationship as a means to other ends.

Central to this perspective is the fact that people have to be helped to help themselves and that the individual is to be perceived and helped within the familial, social and economic context in which they live.

For social workers, the context in which their clients live is increasingly complex and harmful. To help alleviate the impact of such problems - and to go some way to reducing them in the first place - the social worker must be committed and highly motivated, able to form working relationships with those they serve and be aware of the economic realities of the world around them. Social work has to re-find its soul. A reconsideration of Fr.

Biestek's work - still relevant 40 years on - is an ideal start to such a search.