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The article focuses on the human resource crisis in social work education in the United States. In November 1991, the Task Force on Social Work Research issued its now widely acclaimed report entitled "Building Social Work Knowledge for Effective Services and Policies: A Plan for Research Development." Sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, this report declared the existence of a "crisis" in social work research. In September 1998, a follow-up report was published. Entitled A Report on Progress in the Development of Research Resources in Social Work, it appeared under the aegis of the Institute for the Advancement of Social Work Research. Notably, the latter organization did not exist at the time of the 1991 report, rather, it was established as a result of that report. The presumed advances made by a profession, or any other societal group, cannot be understood fully by merely analyzing absolute gains on a single dimension. Rather, putative "advances" must be evaluated in relative terms. On this basis, there is reason to conclude instead that social work education faces a largely unrecognized and underestimated crisis of major proportions. Concomitantly, a growing disparity exists between the numbers of educators who generate research-based knowledge for social work and the practitioners who seek such knowledge. In relative terms, then, social work education may be in a much weaker position today than it was in 1991.

Background. Little is known about the frequency with which information from the Internet is presented by patients within primary care consultations or the subsequent impact that it may have on those consultations.Objectives. The aims of this study were to describe the frequency with which Internet information was presented within primary care consultations in one inner-city health authority and to describe the characteristics of the subsequent consultation from the perspective of the health professionals involved.Methods. A postal survey was used to estimate the frequency of Internet information presentation and eight in-depth interviews were used to obtain health professionals' perceptions of the consultations that followed.Results. Presentation of information from the Internet was relatively infrequent within primary care at the time of the survey (November 2000 to March 2001), but frequencies of presentation were higher for GPs than for any other health professional group. Health professionals have stereotypical views of Internet users and fear for their own professional status in relation to the Internet-informed patient or client.Conclusions. Although presentation of information from the Internet to date remains relatively infrequent, health professionals appear to feel threatened by it and adopt strategies that minimize its impact on the subsequent consultation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]