Sally Riggall is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Lincoln where she teaches communication skills to students. She is a qualified counsellor and has many years experience working as a counselling trainer. Sally's research interest is in finding ways of helping students to develop their practical communication skills with service-users in social work practice. Her most recent research project involves collaborating with social workers in training to evaluate how the Egan Skilled Helper Model equips students to develop effective, empathic communication skills which place service-users at the centre of decision making.

Introduction
Counselling Skills and Social Work
Building Relationships
Empathic Responding
Overcoming Barriers
Using Challenging Skills to Raise Concerns
Service-Users Managing Their Own Lives
Working with Loss and Grief
Working with Conflict
Counselling Skills in Groupwork
Counselling Skills in Different Settings
Conclusion

This practical book enables students to develop key counselling skills that can help to enhance their practice and help to place the service-user at the centre of the decision making process. Relationship building will be a key area of the text and relevant counselling skills for achieving this in social work settings such as empathic responding will be illustrated in detail together with examples of dialogue and analysis of interventions. The role and importance of self-awareness will be discussed together with various exercises to develop the readers' own knowledge of themselves.