A family court advisor who left her personal Filofax sitting on a wheelie bin outside a service user's home has been admonished for six months by the General Social Care Council.
The woman admitted to leaving the Filofax, but denied it contained any confidential information about her or any service users. The GSCC's conduct committee accepted this, but noted that she had nonetheless failed to comply with a clear instruction from her manager not to go back and collect the Filofax herself.
The committee found misconduct proved because it was "not acceptable for a social worker to be careless with material relating to service users" and because it was "unacceptable for a social worker not to follow a reasonable and lawful instruction from a line manager".
Yet the committee also conceded that the woman had only ignored her manager's instructions because she believed she had simply left behind her personal diary. It was, the committee said, clearly a one-off incident. Which begs the question: when does a mistake become misconduct?
We recently reported that, in the first six months of 2010 to 21 June, there had already been 69 conduct hearings; more than double the number held throughout 2009. Perhaps the threshold for what does and does not merit a full conduct hearing needs to be reviewed.
I think a lot of the alleged 'misconduct' cases should have been dealt with by the worker's immediate manager, especially for 'one off' mistakes, like this one. It has to be accepted that workers under extreme workload/time pressures may sometimes be forgetful/make mistakes. Other cases could be satisfactorily resolved by someone more senior in the organisation eg area manager, using disciplinary procedures. In the case where the social worker gave his own money to help a family, because he felt terrible about having removed their children, is clearly a case where adequate supervision and access to counselling would have been far more appropriate and effective. The GSCC should only be involved in serious misconduct case cases, when all other options have failed.