‘We are quite a “can anyone help me?” kind of team’: the role of the team as secure base in social workers’ sensemaking

There is recognition that teams act as a locus for the sensemaking activity that underpins social workers’ judgement. Research has highlighted that teams also provide emotional support for practitioners. Although sensemaking involves emotional and social processes, there has been limited examination of how emotional support in teams interacts with sensemaking. This article uses the Team as Secure Base (TASB) model as a framework for presenting findings from an ethnographic study of four social work teams in England. Data comprise interviews with social workers and supervisors (n=22) and fieldnotes from observations (n=23). Teams exhibited behaviour consistent with the domains of TASB, creating a space for safe exploration of social workers’ thoughts and feelings. However, while a strong sense of team membership contributed to participants’ sense of safety and self-efficacy, this impacted on sensemaking in other ways, such as giving less weight to the views of those who were not team members.