Social service based on professional guidance of knowledge and experience. It includes two aspects: consulting clients and consulting social workers.
Provide consultation for clients, including all kinds of clients, such as widowed, lonely, poor, unemployed, disabled, mentally ill, chronically ill, deviant actors, their families, relatives and friends, etc. , to help them solve the problem of applying for and receiving services, and to understand the nature, functions, service items and quantity of relief or welfare institutions; Analyze and guide whether the applicant has the conditions to receive services, including the applicant's identity, age, experience, family situation, economic situation, independent living ability, reasons for unemployment and illness, whether he has received assistance, whether there are sources of assistance, what kind of assistance and subsidies are needed, and the amount of assistance and service items that may be obtained. Social work consulting institutions are divided into two categories: ① professional and independent consulting institutions, which provide low-cost or free services to applicants, and are responsible for providing relevant information, guiding application procedures and assisting in handling related matters; (2) attached to the social service departments of factories, mines, enterprises, schools, hospitals and other units, the person responsible for answering questions.
Consultation for social workers is usually because social workers encounter different difficulties and problems in their work and lack some specialized knowledge and technology. They need to ask relevant experts for guidance, solve problems, improve the quality of professional services and provide effective help to the recipients. Some social work scholars call it indirect professional service. Some of this consultation is conducted within the social workers' team, such as child welfare workers consulting mental health social workers, and some high-level social workers consulting social workers who have just joined the work or worked at the grassroots level. Some of them are carried out in different professional fields, such as medical workers providing advice to social workers on medical knowledge of diseases, and public health nurses providing advice to public health social workers.