The Inspector

One social worker who contacted me this week said he was not surprised at the Birmingham case and said social workers were fast burning out everywhere - which is why there are recruitment and retention problems in the profession. "Unless there is a radical change within social work, the future is far from bright," he said.

I wanted to be a social worker, once upon a time. It seemed like a real thing to do, opposed to pen-pushing at a desk - which, at the age of 20, seemed to sum up much of the world of work.

I started as a volunteer one day a week in a homeless drop-in centre, and felt rewarded by the feeling that I was making a difference. Relieving people's isolation and pain, giving them someone to talk to, someone to listen to them, giving them time. This seemed like a powerful point to my existence.

I went to work full-time in a hostel for young homeless people. There things kicked off on a regular basis. I saw my first overdose, a lad turning blue in the living room.

The lad discharged himself from hospital the same day and walked back into the hostel with the tubes from his drips half hanging from his arms - a debauched Lazarus raised from the dead. He went up to his room and I followed him and tried in my embarrassing naievety to hold a conversation with him. "Why did you do it? "I asked. "Because I wanted to die," he said, his dark eyes fixing on mine, as he tightened his belt round his arm and got ready for the next hit.

The next day, I saw the most spectacular display of projectile vomiting I have ever seen. The lad was moved to another hostel where he seemed happy when I bumped into him weeks later. "They let me just take my drugs and go to sleep," he said. I don't know whether he is alive or dead.

But I saw others die on the streets, including a man the same age as me, who drank himself steadily to death, refusing all help even to the point of refusing to get into an amubulance when it was waiting beside him.

Another addict I worked with once looked at me with a terrifying nothingness in his eyes and asked, sneeringly: "How much do you get paid?" I did the sums. My salary was enough to keep him housed for a year. He overdosed and died. I saw little point in what I was doing.

Over four years as an outreach worker, I saw too many people die. I burned out and left.

After that experience, becoming a "proper" social worker seemed like a crazy idea. I had been thrown in at the deep end, an untrained volunteer progressing to an untrained paid worker dealing with some of the most complex people in our society. Doctors have medicine. Builders have bricks to make houses. I had no tools, no way of measuring whether I was making a difference.

I know former colleagues are doing the same rounds, still trying to rescuing many of the same people who were there ten years ago on the streets when I left.

How do they carry on? Several have had their own breakdowns through the stress of the work but somehow manage to keep their jobs.

Although there was one person who tried his best to provide good management without much organisational support I left because I didn't get enough supervision or training to deal with being around often extremely disturbed individuals every day. The fall-out was sleepless nights, guilt over not helping people enough, grief when people died and the daily stress of dealing with threats of violence and verbal abuse. I never got to the stage of becoming hardened and desensitised although I saw colleagues becoming this way.

Those remaining on the frontline without jumping to the dryer ground of management are rare but to be admired. It is often down to individual charisma and hard-won experience and maturity - qualities that cannot be manufactured through even the best professional courses.

In my experience, giving staff the right training, supervision and support would be the only way to stop people leaving frontline work in droves. There needs to be consistent investment to create proper standards and a rise in the status of social work as a valued profession. But is it going to happen?

Have you ever suffered burnout? Contact maria.ahmed@rbi.co.uk in confidence