The organisation representing social work directors in Scotland is to throw its doors open to private, voluntary and health sector chiefs in an overhaul designed to take account of public service reforms.

The Association of Directors of Social Work, which currently represents middle and senior managers in local government social work services, is being renamed Social Work Scotland to reflect the transformation in its membership.

The Scottish government’s decision to legislate to integrate adult social care and health, reforms to community justice services and the increasing integration of children’s services are among the reasons behind the shift.

As well as senior managers in public, private, voluntary and health bodies responsible for delivering social work services, membership will be open to more junior managers in these organisations who aspire to rise up the ranks.

“There has never been a more important time for leaders across the social work profession to have a cohesive voice to ensure that the unique contribution, role and potential of social work are fully promoted and developed,” said president Sandy Riddell. “Social Work Scotland will play a critical role in making this happen.”

The new organisation will be formally launched in June at its annual conference, along with a 10-year strategy for its work.

http://jobs.communitycare.co.uk/job/1401422572/residential-care-manager/

There’s a famous advertising slogan that goes: “It does exactly what it says on the tin”. That’s as may be, but modern life means you have to know what it doesn’t say on the tin.

Alarming incidents

Parents and foster carers have to be especially alert to what it doesn’t say on the tin. Earlier this week, one of our foster children asked me if I had any cinnamon. I had a hunt around the back of the larder and found a couple of sticks. The child said: “That’s not cinnamon, cinnamon is a red powder.” The child wanted ground cinnamon.

Normally I would have asked what the cinnamon was for, but this particular child tends to be a closed book and resents being questioned. Anyway, what could anyone want cinnamon for but biscuits? I wrote it on the shopping list and spent £1.89 on a tiny jar (and mentally rehearsed doing some baking, a joyful thing to do with children, especially if it’s their idea).

Only the child wasn’t planning to use the cinnamon for baking, it was used to self harm. That was definitely not on the tin.

Pain they can control

Self-harming is a huge concern in fostering. One’s instinct is to try to prevent the child from self-harming, to hide everything that might be used, suggesting, instructing and eventually begging the child not to do it. But one’s instinct is wrong.

We should refrain from disapproval. If we come across a foster child in their bedroom with blood coming from their arms, we should stay calm and neutral, ask them if they’re OK, fetch some towels and then follow the appropriate medical course of action.

This particular foster child is a delightful person who, with a bit of luck, will grow to become the person they were destined to be. That is, before something led them to doubt their worth and created a desire to feel pain they could control.

That, we are told, is what is usually going on when children and young people cut themselves. Or chew through their own cheeks. Or burn themselves, punch themselves, swallow things or put things into their body in other ways.

Moral dilemmas

Or ask for cinnamon, which was neither eaten nor inserted by the way. I know how it was used to self-harm because this particular foster child trusts us enough to do it openly, even asking me if I wanted to try.

And here’s another dilemma: do I explain how the cinnamon was used even though there’s a risk that a vulnerable person may read this? Well, I’ll tell you how this everyday household ingredient was used. It could be a helpful forewarning and the information is already in the public domain anyway.

A small amount of salt is placed on the forearm, then sprinkled with cinnamon. An ice cube is also involved and the mixture creates a benign burn, which leaves a red mark that stays for several days.
I called my social worker for advice. She advised: “Don’t make a thing out of it. And don’t run out of ice or cinnamon; the child might be tempted to go on to something worse.”

What it doesn’t say on the tin…

I squinted at the small print on the little cinnamon jar. It said: “Rub into a leg…” and I thought to myself, “Aha! They are clued up about this!” Then I turned the jar round to read the rest of the advice. “Rub into a leg…of lamb for wondrous winter flavours.”

The secret foster carer is a blogger and registered foster carer with Blue Sky Fostering.

Story updated 10.15am 11 March 2014

Social workers are being prevented from tackling the abuse of vulnerable adults behind closed doors by a lack of powers, not their lack of knowledge, research with councils has suggested.

However, the government has resisted a final attempt to amend the Care Bill to include a new power of entry to enable social workers to take action in such cases.

Practitioners were denied access to vulnerable adults suspected of being abused 29 times in the past year because a third party was blocking access, found research conducted under the Freedom of Information Act with 84 of the 152 English councils.

On 21 of these occasions, access was never gained as a result and on none of the 29 occasions was the failure to gain access because of social workers’ failure to use existing powers to gain access to the person.

The findings from the research, conducted by Action on Elder Abuse (AEA), follow a vigorous debate through the passage of the Care Bill on whether social workers should gain a new power of entry, with judicial authority, to enter homes where abuse is suspected but entry is blocked.

Final stages of Care Bill

In a debate at the bill’s report stage in the House of Commons yesterday, ex-care minister Paul Burstow made a final attempt to amend the legislation to include a power of entry. But he was forced to withdraw the amendment after the government made clear it would not support it.

Paul Burstow (Photo credit: Gary Brigden)

As before, the government rejected Burstow’s amendment on the grounds that existing powers are sufficient to enable social workers to gain access where a third party is blocking access to the vulnerable adult, but that practitioners lack the legal literacy to make full use of them. Care minister Norman Lamb has promised practitioners guidance on how to use existing powers and he said yesterday these would be drafted by the end of this month.

Action on Elder Abuse’s research was designed to support of Burstow’s amendment and challenge the government’s case that existing powers were sufficient. Of the 84 councils to respond to its Freedom of Information request, 28 could not access the data within the time limit and 12 did not hold the data. Of the remaining 44, 32 did not experience a failure to gain entry in the last 12 months, while the remaining 12 experienced 29 failures to do so.

Safeguarding practitioners back new power

A separate survey with 365 members of AEA’s practitioners network – including safeguarding specialists from local authorities and the NHS – found 82.2% indicated support for Burstow’s amendment. Just over half (55.3%) said they did not think failures to gain access currently were due to a lack of knowledge of the current law, though 44.7% suggested this might be the case.

“The conclusions indicate a strong view by those with the front line experience of adult safeguarding that the law needs strengthening,” said AEA. “While there may be a need to improve understanding of the law, this is not what is preventing access to adults in such vulnerable situations.”

Last month, AEA published a legal opinion from Alex Ruck Keene, a barrister specialising in the Mental Capacity Act 2005, rejecting the case that existing powers were sufficient to enable social workers to access adults at risk in such circumstances. It has also sent a letter to the prime minister backing Burstow’s amendment, signed by over 500 people or organisations, including The Law Society, The College of Social Work and the British Association of Social Workers.

Warning over risk-averse practice

Burstow’s proposed power would have carried a number of safeguards to prevent its misuse and guard against adverse consequences:

• its use would have to be authorised by a Court of Protection circuit judge;
• the applying social worker would have to have reasonable cause to suspect the person was at risk of or experiencing abuse or neglect and unable to make decisions freely;
• the judge would have to be satisfied that all reasonable and practicable steps had been taken to access the person before application to use the power, that use of the power is necessary to pursue a safeguarding enquiry and that exercising the power would not result in the person being put at increased risk;
• the power could only be exercised once and the social worker would need to be accompanied by a police officer.
• However, Lamb cited the views of the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and chief social worker for adults Lyn Romeo in arguing that a new power would be unnecessary and counterproductive.
• He quoted Romeo as saying: “An additional power of entry or access on its own would be insufficient, and indeed could make the situation worse.”
• Lamb invited Burstow to participate in drafting the guidelines for practitioners, which the Social Care Institute for Excellence is expected to lead on.

Existing powers of entry

Existing powers of entry include:-

• for the police to gain entry to premises to protect life or limb or to arrest someone for an indictable offence, under section 17 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984;
• for approved mental health professionals to apply to a magistrate for authority to enter a home, with the police, where it is suspected that a person with a mental disorder is being abused or neglected or is unable to take care of themselves, under section 135 of the Mental Health Act 1983;
• for councils to apply to the Court of Protection for an order to assess a person who they suspect is at risk but lacks mental capacity to take decisions to protect themselves;
• for councils to apply to the High Court to use its inherent jurisdiction to issue enabling them to protect vulnerable adults at risk, where statutory powers do not apply;

Also, the government is due to implement shortly new powers under the Crime and Security Act 2010, allowing a police superintendent to issue a domestic violence protection notice to an alleged perpetrator preventing them from molesting their victim or entering their home for 48 hours. This would trigger a magistrates’ hearing, enabling the police to apply for a domestic violence protection order, extending the prohibitions up to 28 days.

By Daisy Bogg, practice adviser at The College of Social Work and AMHP

Social workers in mental health teams are under intense pressure. As Community Care reported last week, the latest annual NHS staff survey results show that we have overtaken other professions working in mental health in terms of the levels of stress being reported by frontline staff.

Lack of support, poor communication, a decrease in professional development and increasing levels of bullying and harassment are all cited in the survey as contributory factors. In this context our professional resilience is taking a pounding, with social workers finding themselves simply unable to cope with the demands they find themselves under.

So how can social workers support themselves and each other? How can organisations better support professional resilience in their social workers? These types of questions have been the focal point for two ‘Looking after yourself’ online debates run by The College of Social Work.

We ran our first debate in December last year and held a follow-up discussion last week. Both debates highlighted a dual responsibility for supporting staff wellbeing. While we can be more proactive and build ourselves strategies to cope with our stress and look after our own well-being, the issue also needs to be addressed systemically, with organisational cultures being part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

There is no doubt that practice is a difficult place to be at the moment. Our Approved Mental Health Professional practice survey in 2013 and the subsequent work of Community Care and the BBC in highlighting the impact of cuts across the mental health system, left no doubt that AMHPs are often dealing with intolerable and plainly risky situations for all concerned. But the situation isn’t restricted to AMHP roles – it’s system wide and in this context it’s not surprising that stress levels are up for all mental health social workers.

Making the most of limited resources is important, but so is supporting your workforce. The employer standards were created for that very reason, in recognition that the workforce (in this case social workers but the same principles apply in other sectors) is the most important resource. Working people to the edge of burn out is counterproductive and has longer term financial and social costs.

Basic standards – like supervision being seen as essential rather than an additional time pressure and development time being supported – do make a huge difference to how people feel and how resilient they are.

Developing mentally healthy workplaces is not just about information, spotting the signs or doing something special to raise awareness of mental health issues. More importantly it is about providing good support, recognising and valuing people and their work (saying thank you for a job well done once in a while for example), and helping staff to develop a healthy work/life balance.

In my experience a burnt out social worker isn’t a good social worker. We and those that rely on us, deserve better.

By Blair McPherson

It was a conference for our staff who were also carers. The idea was to identify those members of staff who cared for a family member or relative and enlist their support in coming up with ways we could be a better employer.

To date people had been reluctant to identify themselves as carers. In general people kept quiet.

They didn’t mention it at interview for fear that it would be assumed they would be taking time off to look after the person and they didn’t mention it once in post for fear they would be considered less flexible than staff who did not have caring responsibilities.

We thought that if could get them to the conference then we would have a list of names and could start discussions on the value of a registrar of carers.

We were taken by surprise at the number of people who put their names forward to attend. So we booked a bigger venue and ran two conferences – one in the morning and the other on the same day in the afternoon. My role as director was to open the conference.

I had planned my opening remarks but only decided to talk about my dad when the conference organiser suggested some thing personal would encourage people to be more open in the workshops.

My dad was in my mind because I had visited him the previous Sunday.

My brother who lives much nearer had telephoned to tell me that on a recent visit the neighbours had button holed him to express concern, some tale about him climbing up a ladder to paint the eves. My dad was 81 at the time, lived on his own and had always been a little eccentric, very independent with the potential to be awkward.

Once I started it wasn’t difficult to recount stories of what my dad had got up to. I told the story about him forgetting he had withdrawn money from his Post Office account and conducting a sit in protest that resulted in two burly police officers frog marching him out. It must have been an amusing sight and certainly made for a funny story.

But of course it is not that funny if your the son dealing with complaints from the Post Office manager who has banned your father or the police contacting you asking if you are aware of his behaviour, both asking what you are going to do about it and you knowing there is not much you can do especially as your dad denies it ever happened.

Encouraged by the audience response I talked about his recent forgetfulness, his issues with money and his conspiracy theories but mostly how his behaviour was causing more concern and creating tension in the family.

My two brothers who lived close by felt the pressure, one had his persistent offers of help rejected as interfering and so he was backing off. There was a difference of views about how best to handle dad and how concerned we should be.

Feedback from the workshops was very positive people had really opened up in the discussions. The organiser was very enthusiastic and the morning conference ended on a very positive note.

After lunch the conference organiser approached me to say she hoped I would open the second conference in the same way. But I couldn’t.

I hadn’t realised how emotionally spent I was after the first session. When the adrenaline stopped I was drained.

I didn’t feel that I could talk about my dad again, it wouldn’t feel right, it would somehow be insincere to repeat what I had sad that morning. So I didn’t and it was all a bit flat.

The feedback from the workshops was that people in the afternoon were nowhere near as open or forthcoming about their experiences. I could tell the conference organiser was disappointed but she said she understood.

What I realised was that you can’t expect people to just open up about caring for some one close to them and having opened up they can’t be expected to do it every time just because their is a new audience or a new professional who wants to help.

Blair McPherson is an author and commentator on health and social care.

Wolverhampton City Council is planning to outsource its social care services to external providers in a bid to save £123m in the next five years.

A total of 25 adults’ and children’s services delivered by the council are set to be handed over to private or voluntary sector providers.

Affected services include residential homes for children and older people, learning disability day services and the mental health community inclusion team.

Labour councillor Steve Evans, the city’s cabinet member for adult services, blamed the move on reductions in central government funding.

“If Whitehall goes ahead with its intended spending plans the money provided to Wolverhampton by government will have reduced by more than half over four years,” he said.

“Therefore, like many other local authorities, we are having to look at everything we do to ensure we offer the best quality services to our customers while also providing good value for money to taxpayers.

“Engaging with one or more external partners to provide our services has been identified as the option which would have the least effect on service users and minimise the impact on employees.”

Sue Brealey, chair of Unison’s Wolverhampton branch, said the union was concerned that providers taking on the service will be expected to cut costs, which could negatively impact both staff and local communities.

“There’s a lot of concern among staff at the moment,” she said. “We have a meeting diaried to consult our members on their views as we need to know what their views are.”

Wolverhampton’s proposals also include replacing social workers with care assistants in adult assessment and care management, higher charges for service users using non-residential adult care and slashing staff mileage rates from 45p to 25p a mile from April 2015.

Brealey said that if the council went ahead with the reduced mileage rate it would have a “big impact” on social workers. “They could end up subsiding the authority for doing their work,” she said.

As many as 2,000 jobs across the local authority could be lost in the next five years under the plans.

One in four women experiences domestic violence in her lifetime and it’s amongst the most common issues within a social workers caseload. Domestic violence often compounds or is compounded by a number of other issues which may require intervention. For example, 47% of women experiencing domestic violence have mental health needs; 11% have drug misuse issues, 12% have alcohol misuse issues, and 5% have been involved with probation [1]. In addition, 90% of women experiencing domestic violence report that their children have witnessed or been in the next room during an incident of physical violence. Exposure to domestic violence is now recognised as a form of emotional child abuse, so children in families where a woman experiences violence will very often need support too.

This compounding creates a complex web of need which the social worker must untangle. However, limited time and budgets often make it impossible for statutory agencies to provide the specialist support women and children experiencing domestic violence need. In order to achieve positive outcomes for the family, social workers need to be able to quickly access specialist services dedicated to supporting women and children escape domestic violence and rebuild afterwards.

Many social workers have links with their local services, but domestic violence often forces women to move long distances, and service funding means that contacts or indeed whole services can be lost at very short notice. That’s why Women’s Aid has developed the UK Gold Book Online: a unique and invaluable online directory of domestic and sexual violence services across the UK, updated every single day.

Subscribers can search on any combination of the criteria for the most appropriate domestic and sexual violence service available in the UK, which includes geographical area; sexuality and gender; accessibility; languages; specialist services for Black and minority ethnic women and specialist services for men. This means that you can find the best possible service for the survivors you are working with and be assured that the information you are using is completely up-to-date.

Women’s Aid is offering Community Care readers a discounted year’s subscription to the UK Gold Book online for 2014/15. Simply enter the code COMMCARE1/3 on the online form to receive your first year’s subscription for one third of the usual price, giving you savings of upwards of £50. To secure the discount, go to http://www.womensaid.org.uk/ukgoldbook and purchase your subscription before 30 April 2014.

[1] Women’s Aid Annual Survey of Members, Women’s Aid, 2013

Almost half (43%) of the social workers, students and academics responding to our snap poll disagreed with government adviser David Croisdale-Appleby’s proposal to up the number of UCAS points required to study the undergraduate degree from 240 to 300.

Under the proposal, students in England would have to gain the equivalent of three Bs at A level, rather than three Cs as they do now.

However, this was the only one of eight questions in our poll that appeared to polarise the 129 respondents. The other questions, including whether people would support the recommendation to introduce a probationary year and licence to practise system for graduating social workers, were supported by the majority.

Nine out of 10 respondents (93%) agreed that the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) should be extended to all newly-qualified social workers in England.

A similar number agreed that there was a “pressing need” for a national framework for continuing professional development.

And roughly three quarters (77%) thought knowledge about the capabilities and perspectives of related professions, such as medicine, should be introduced into the social work curriculum.

Of the 129 respondents to our snap poll, 68 identified themselves as social workers, 35 as students, 13 as academics and 10 as “other”.