A fascinating insight into the views of social workers on key issues in social care from Professor Eileen Munro was published last week.
It’s a short and accessible report that’s easy to read in full; here are a couple of points that stood out to me:
- 72% of social work practitioners agreed that performance targets took priority over time with service users. This tension created personal stress in the same proportion of practitioners.
- Some 64% of social work practitioners recognise that cuts to managerial posts affected their ability to do their job; at the same time, 63% of practitioners felt senior managers don’t understand the realities of frontline social work. There is a disjuncture between these two findings, which suggests to me the need for relationship building within social work organisations
- 66% of practitioners felt their caseloads had ‘slightly’ or ‘significantly’ increased in the last 12 months. That means a third felt caseloads hadn’t increased, as well.
This is not the sort of environment in which good social work can readily take place.
(Thanks Louise D for the original link.)
arbitrary constant 
I wonder if there really is a disjuncture in your second bullet? isn’t this about a severe reduction in management structures leading to reduced support ( and fewer promotion opportunities!) from juunior/frontline managers. Yet in the past it was they who kept top mgrs in touch with delivery realities. So you get underinformed top managers leading an overslimmed pressurised and stressed hiearchy that only has time to broadcast messages downwards at the expense of reflecting impact issues faithfully up the chain.
This problem appears to be endemic in the NHS; and was heading that way in DWP when I was there. In effect you get problems of undermanagement, or more accurately underinvestment in management. Just a thought: ring any bells?
Thanks – that’s another useful interpretation. Could well be that the reality is perhaps a bit of both?