Complaints of misconduct by social workers and social care workers in Northern Ireland have increased three fold in the last two years,
the BBC reports this morning.
The BBC says that there have been 95 complaints against social workers and social care workers in the last year (the figures from the Northern Ireland Social Care Council actually show 94 but that's an easy mistake to make).
But it also claims the number of complaints have risen three fold from two years ago. This is true, but misleading.
The only figures available combine four years from April 2005 to March 2009. So you have to average out the number of complaints if you want to do a year on year comparison.
But because the register was only introduced in 2005 it has been growing in size over that time so a direct comparison of the number of complaints isn't really possible.
Instead it's more representative to calculate the percentage of complaints based on the total size of the register.
This shows a similar increase in figures but only over the last year for which the average applies, when the register was at its largest. It is reasonable to assume that the complaints were not evenly spread and therefore grew with the size of the register, while there has been a percentage increase over this time it's pretty small, ranging from around 0.4% (the middle figure from the averaged years) to 0.7%. That's less than doubling and hardly a three fold increase.
Add to this the numbers of people found guilty, which is rising by a similar amount (0.03% to 0.08% over the same period) and the percentage of successful case which has risen only two percentage points in that time (hardly statistically significant) and you end up with a picture of rises which can be explained by other factors.
One, you would expect it to grow as knowledge of the avenues for complaint spread after the register's introduction.
Two, the increasing percentage of people found guilty of misconduct this small is more likely to be a product of bedding in the regulation system than an outbreak of poor practice. People are more likely to bring cases with more merit once advice, based on past cases, is more readily available.
So, while the level of complaints has increased slightly it isn't really something to worry about.
Read the complete post at http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/social-work-blog/2011/08/the-bbc-is-misleading-miscondu.html
Posted
31 Aug 2011 10:24 AM
by
The Social Work Blog
| Report Abuse