anti oppressive practice or not advertising who we are
we got a memo sent round our office last week, would all staff clearly wear the ID badges at all times, well i was not happy, and i moaned and moaned and was then told to just get on with it. my issue you see is that the service users we work with would like a bit of privacy and probably dont want their neighbours / friends/ joe blogs in the street to know that they have a mental health social worker ( or in the case of my colleagues a psychiatric nurse) visiting them at home or taking them into town for a coffee and if we have to wear our badges then people can see that the person we are with are not actually our friends or relatives but we are paid to be with them, how humiliating! i thought that one of the things about anti oppressive practice is being aware of our power and the effect it has on our service users and there is nothing like power than wearing our profession on a badge round our necks or pinned to our jumpers.
its like knocking on doors with the big black diary in our hands or in the case of our MH nurses carrying the black briefcase full of depot medication knocking on the door, where does social inclusion feature in that?
anyway i have a solution wear a long jumper and pin the badge to the waistline of my trousers so that i can cunningly cover it up then when i go onto the wards or into NHS premises i can tuck said jumper in (and look a bit of a dork!) so that those who must be obeyed can see i am flashing my status.
its not all bad at our trust though they have broken the links with the drug companies, no more reps coming round giving us free lunches, pens, badges t-shirts t-towels (the last three were lies) so we listen to their latest speil about how superior their drugs are in fighting the menace of mental health, i was so pleased and so were any of the people i work with although there were a few that were dissapointed there was no more free lunches, for me its just never felt ethically sound to take backhanders from the multi nationals.