Social Worker Sharing

  I am probably not going to be putting a new blog up for a couple of weeks. I have volunteered for a project that is going to keep me pretty busy. I find that I am definitely the person that volunteers to do stuff. I'm the one that speaks up in meetings. I am the one that provides answering in training courses or classes. I do not see any of these as a bad thing but I am also aware of how this can stop other people having opportunities. If I get there first to volunteer or give the answer other people do not have the chance. Luckily I feel like I am pretty good at allowing silence when I am on a visit. I understand that some people need longer to process so I give them the chance to do so before commenting further. I think that when I am in a class or a course part of me feels sorry for the person running it and I don't want them to feel like nobody is interested in what they have to say. On the other side I have definitely had feedback that I need to step back at times...

 After my recent return to work I have been catching up with everything. I went through the over 3000 emails I came back to and sorted all my IT issues. I am now back on the system and have cases allocated to me. This has meant that I feel more like I am back at work. One of the things I have had to do is update some documentation from cases I worked on before I went on maternity leave. I didn't expect this to have an impact on me but when I went to look at them and realised that of the four I need to update, two of them had passed away. This reminded me of the trickier side of our job, one of the people was someone I worked with for a long time and the first time I met them they were still at home with a package of care. I saw them go through all the stages that lead to the end of their life but was not there at the very end. It hit me hard when I saw this and found myself trying not to cry. I am quite an emotional person so me crying isn't a big shock but it just really ...

  I attended a seminar this week which was provided as a space for practitioners to discuss Social Work in a pandemic. It was an interesting session to attend and allowed me to link up with people who work all over the country and hear their perspectives. I always forget how different my experience of Social Work education and starting my career has been because of the pandemic. I think because it is all I have known it doesn't feel strange to me. It was not until I mentioned that I have been in my team in various capacities for approximately 14 months but have never been in my office and saw the reactions that I was reminded. People in the session who have been practising for many years were so shocked and this led to an interesting discussion about the amount of information you can learn from being in the office and overhearing it. They talked about working somewhere for a while and only knowing about certain paperwork because a colleague mentioned it in passing. I explaine...

  I have talked in a previous post about the way people learn but I was thinking about where that learning comes from. There are obvious sources such as places of education or training courses but actually there are so many places you can gain new knowledge from, especially in Social Work. I have attended a lot of training courses and I mean a lot, but I find that a lot of my learning comes from day-to-day experiences that I take for granted. It comes from a conversation with a colleague or another professional. It can come from reading an article or hearing a podcast. It could also come from a conversation with a stranger. There are certain things in life that I have not experienced because I come from a place of privilege. That does not mean that I cannot attend things or have open conversations that expand my horizons and allow me to learn more about those types of situations. As I am sure you can tell from my picture, I am White British, and this means that I have not dea...