‘Social workers need job independence’

Directors and lead councillors must let front-line social workers
do the job they were trained to do if the adult green paper’s
vision is to succeed.

That was the message from the British Association of Social Workers
in its response to the consultation on the government’s vision for
adult social care, which closed this week.

It backed the paper’s idea that social workers should become
navigators, not gatekeepers, of services, saying this embodied the
empowering role practitioners had been trained to perform.

But BASW professional officer Ruth Cartwright said achieving this
shift required a change in a management culture that supported
gatekeeping. She also questioned the government’s assumption that
resources could be shifted from acute services to preventive care,
arguing that early intervention would not necessarily stop people
having high-level needs.