While the use of digital media and technologies has impacted social work for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic and need for physical distancing dramatically accelerated the systematic use of video calls and other digital practices to interact with service users. This article draws from our research into child protection to show how digital social work was used during the pandemic, critically analyse the policy responses, and make new concepts drawn from digital and design anthropology available to the profession to help it make sense of these developments. While policy responses downgraded digital practices to at best a last resort, we argue that the digital is now an inevitable and necessary element of social work practice, which must be understood as a hybrid practice that integrates digital practices such as video calls and face-to-face interactions. Moving forward, hybrid digital social work should be a future-ready element of practice, designed to accommodate uncertainties as they arise and sensitive to the improvisatory practice of social workers.

尽管数字媒体和技术的使用已影响社会工作了数年，但Covid-19大流行和对物理距离的需求极大地加快了视频通话和其他数字惯例与服务用户进行交互的系统性使用。本文从我们对儿童保护的研究中汲取了经验，展示了在大流行期间如何使用数字社会工作，批判性地分析了政策对策，并向该行业提供了从数字和设计人类学中汲取的新概念，以帮助其理解这些发展。尽管政策对策最多只能将数字化实践降级，但我们认为数字化现在是社会工作实践的必然和必要要素，必须将其理解为一种混合做法，将视频电话和面对面的互动等数字做法集成在一起。展望未来，混合数字社会工作应成为一种面向未来的实践元素，旨在适应不确定性的出现和对社工即兴实践的敏感性。