Everyone remembers their first social work assessment. I recall mine like it was yesterday. Driving to the address in my brother’s hand-me-down Peugeot 205 (rust-spotted with leaking sunroof), walking up the drive with heart in mouth, knocking the decaying wooden door, the tension building as you stand eye to eye with a stranger.
Qualifying as a social worker in the mid-1990s was as good as it got for me, and John (the first recipient of hundreds of visits) taught me more about social work than the many preceding hours sat in the lecture theatre. John had Alzheimer’s disease and was recently widowed. His house was in a poor state, the memories of a healthier and happier life not so much haunting him as locking him into a 1950s time warp. He was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, his bed broken, his sheets and blankets fraying. I saw him every day that week at different times – first thing in the morning, midday, on my way home – to get a sense of his patterns and behaviour. He shared stories with me, showed me pictures of his family, got angry offered me out-of-date biscuits and on Friday a bottle of stout to start off my weekend!
After those five daily interventions I’d soaked up enough to write a short story on John, and in some ways I did, as the assessment form back then was a blank sheet, allowing a creative flow to the assessment process. I subsequently found John some new furniture through a local charity, and bumped into an Italian neighbour (also recently widowed) who offered to cook John a daily meal. I contacted his niece, who took him out for a pint on a Friday night and, despite decrying the local bereavement club (“I don’t want to sit around talking about death all night long”), I believe he made some new friends there.
Fast forward 20 years and I’m managing a bustling social work service, looking at the hundreds of assessments and reviews for each person, each with tick boxes, algorithms and staccato prose, which is now the norm in social work offices all over the country. This saddens me and makes me want to hit life’s equivalent of the reverse gear on my trusty Peugeot.
With the Care Act mere weeks away from implementation, coupled with immense scrutiny on budgets and increasing numbers of vulnerable older people, social work has no option but to get back out into the community and reconnect with it. You can call it prevention, signposting, social capital; for me the winners will be those workers who can harness local knowledge and build relationships and networks across their patch.
So for 2015 I hope we can we ring the death knell for the cold transactional notion of care management and refocus on authentic social work interventions. Last year I completed a leadership course through the National Skills Academy, where I met like-minded managers from across the country. This year I have met newly trained social workers coming into the profession with inspiring motivation and passion for the people they serve.
This has rekindled my faith in and love for the work I do and made me realise that I have a responsibility to build and lead a new model of social work. No longer a snatch and grab assessment with a generous care package “just to be on the safe side”, but a genuine shift to the thoughtful interventions, discussions and connections that ensure I never forget that first trip to meet John.
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