In this online course you will learn:

Who Holds the Ledger? examines why health and human-service systems frequently account more reliably for expenditure, activity and crisis than for prevention, capability, continuity, rights, community resilience and equity.

The keynote starts from a simple premise: contemporary social work is not merely a downstream service or referral function. Social workers already operate across clinical and relational practice, advocacy and rights, safeguarding, community development, policy implementation, population health, organisational leadership, co-production and cross-sector systems change. Social prescribing is one mechanism within that wider landscape – not a substitute for the profession.

The session asks how this contribution can become more visible in the decisions that determine funding, accountability and system design. Drawing on social return on investment (SROI), health-economic reasoning and equity analysis, participants will examine perspective, time horizon, comparator, resource consequences, distribution, missing populations and uncertainty – while distinguishing wider social value, capacity gains and genuinely cashable savings.

The keynote then moves from measurement to action: who holds the population interest, who finances intervention, who verifies value, where communities hold power, and what happens when predictive technology identifies vulnerability. Its final proposition is that prediction creates little social value unless an accountable, funded and contestable human response can alter the trajectory.

The objective is not to teach social workers to prove their worth. It is to strengthen their ability to make the value they already create visible enough to influence investment, policy, governance and the design of healthier and more equitable systems.

Learning objectives

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

1. Articulate social work’s strategic contribution to health and wellbeing. Describe how contemporary social work contributes across individual, family, community, organisational and systems levels – including clinical and relational practice, prevention, rights and advocacy, community capability, integration, equity and systems leadership – and distinguish this broader professional contribution from social-prescribing link work alone.
2. Apply an evidence-and-equity lens to an existing programme or report. Interrogate a service using perspective, time horizon, comparator, outcomes, resource consequences, distribution, missing populations and uncertainty, while distinguishing social value, capacity or productivity gains, and cashable savings.
3. Translate evidence into accountable cross-sector action. Map a health or human-service intervention by identifying the steward, financier, reconciler (evaluator), delivery partners and community or rights-holder, and identify at least one practical change to reporting, funding, governance or digital and predictive-health implementation that could begin within their organisation.