Social Worker Sharing

One thing to be said about social work is that no two days are the same. We are expected to be so many different things to the people we support, sometimes even within the same visit. We get allocated cases where we have bare minimum levels of information and we have to play detective. We have people come through who have never been known to social services or have just relocated area so there is not really anything to go on other than the referral to us. We may get names of who is involved but nothing telling us how. So it's down to us to speak to all the relevant people, decide how to proceed, does it need a visit with everyone, a multi disciplinary meeting or do we need to try and speak to the person on their own. Sometimes we don't even know until we arrive what we are going to discover and what seemed really complicated is actually very simple and vice versa. If you add in any extra complications such as previous involvement from other local authorities you can spen...

Well the I suppose you'd call it inevitable happened. I hit burnout. It's why there hasn't been a blog for a couple of months. I did not have the brain power to think about anything more than day to day survival and to be honest even that was a struggle. When joining the profession, training, on placement and in pretty much every form of media related to Social Work you regularly hear the word burnout but it does not really describe how it actually feels so I am going to do just that. Firstly let me start by talking about the lead up to the actual time off because this was not something that had happened overnight. It is something I believe was beyond the surface for months beforehand. I had people relying on me though so I just pushed it to the back, took on extra responsibilities to distract myself and probably made it all worse if I'm being honest. I noticed months ago that I felt to be falling out of love with front line Social Work. I wasn't sure if I n...

Self-neglect is something we are coming across more often than I have ever experienced before. It is something I feel like people are more aware of and more concerned about. We receive safeguarding reports about it but it can be very difficult to establish why someone is self neglecting or even get them to see that is what is happening. Statistics show us that self neglect prevalence rates of 116-121 per every 100,000 of the population although it is likely that in reality it is much higher than that as it is under reported. This sounds like a low number when you look at it generally but it is definitely on the rise and there does not seem to be consistency across the board about the approach to be used or whether it should be reported as safeguarding or not. This has meant that there is an unfortunate amount of people who are being discussed in Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) because referrals were not made to relevant authorities meaning that no support was provided and they e...

I knew I wanted to write about poverty for this blog and had already started writing it when someone mentioned to me on a training course about being anti racist that one of the chapters in the anti-racist social worker in practice book is about the link between racism and poverty. I did not want to write about poverty without thinking about the connection or different experiences people can have due to other factors and how the same as other characteristics about people can link via Intersectionality poverty is something that will be experienced differently based on characteristics such as race. Within that chapter it talks about the changes to tax benefits from a survey completed in 2023 by We Are Citizens Advice which shows how different families are impacted money wise. I was extremely surprised that black families are impacted by over triple the amount of white families and Asian families almost double the amount of white families. I understand that we are in a cost of livin...

This blog follows on from my last one about racism so if you have not read that one I recommend reading it first. That talks about my observations and discussions with colleagues. In this blog I want to think a bit more about racism but in terms of how embedded it is into society and what can we do to advocate for or be an ally to people who experience it as well as further observations on information I have learnt since I wrote the previous blog. Since I wrote the last blog I attended a session with Dr Prospera Tedam which focused on how we can build anti-racist practice cultures in Social Work. Some of the points she made were extremely interesting but also made me think deeper about my own practice and approaches that I have seen within Social Work. You would think as a profession who are so focused on Human Rights, Equality, Values and Ethics that racism or discrimination would not be a problem within teams whereas some of the statistics discussed in this session highlight th...

The topic of this blog is going to be racism. As I am sure you can tell from the picture on my profile I am a white woman so I am not necessarily the best person to be writing about this topic but I wanted to give some musings following a recent conference I attended where the focus was all about racism. We did an activity to help us recognise our own privilege. I was sat with colleagues from multiple different cultures and countries. Throughout the activity I was completing my own but also watching how other people were responding to it. It was a list of scenarios or situations and if it was relevant to you then you had to add something to a bag. There was a list of approximately 25 statements. I think I added 6 to my bag but I watched as colleagues added easily double if not triple the amount that I did. I found that it made my heart feel heavy because although I know I have privilege for some aspects of my identity there are some aspects where I do not. I could see people speci...