How are excessive caseloads affecting your work?

Hi,

I qualified a little over a year ago and my caseload is 37+ duty cases.
Because there are only 3 social workers, qualified and unqualified, in my team means my colleagues and I have to do duty 5 out of 15 days.

The team senior has been off sick for the past 2 months, when he first went off was when my manager was on A/L and another collegue was on A/L which meant only 2 social workers, on one day I was the only person in the team except for the team clerk.

My team also has to deal with transition cases and frankly we cannot cope.
Last week I was on leave and I will not be suprised if we are down another social worker because we are all sinking fast.

I work in a physical impairment and learning disabilities team, we are recieving cases which are clearly mental health and those service users are falling through a gap.

I believe my manager is trying to hold the team together but not sure how much longer we can all manage with case loads, targets my employers want us to meet, transitions and Adult safeguarding.

I have expressed my grave concerns about the safety of our service users and the prospect of a serious case review, I feel, is an inevitable consequence of so few staff, two of us having only qualified in the last 18 months.

We will submit the results of our caseloads survey to the Munro review, but of course that only covers children's social work. The reality is, high caseloads plague adult and children's teams.

It might be worth contacting the British Association of Social Workers or Unison for advice. Unison has called fora cap on the number of cases a social worker should be expected to handle.