Social Care who in their right mind who would venture into social care in this day and age, but persons with a willingness to protect and having a ‘Duty of Care’ do, but social care for both children and adults are in crisis for a number of reasons.
1. very severe lack of resources including sufficient social workers, sufficient trained and experienced staff,
2. workload very over burdening what staff there
3. lack of supervisors and managers to supervise and conduct appraisals of staff
distrust of authorities by parents and families
4. very severe lack of finance due to insufficient delivery of grants from Government for well over 12 years and many years before that
5. ‘Duty of care’ to social care staff be they frontline or not.
Bringing children into care could be a very fine point in judgement, due to the ‘dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t’.
There is also too much Government interventions, especially by those who have little comprehension of social care, either by design or ignorance.
In years gone by recommended approaches being the flavour of the day, to be reversed when the flavour of choice changes from one extreme to the opposite rather than looking what is working well within one flavour and others. Even reversing back to one such flavour which went out of favour to reappear without any changes to what was not working previously, so no ‘lessons learnt’.
To a very large extent there is no respect for ‘person-centre care’ as care should be based on an individual not on a theory, for what works in one instance may not in another .Children are individuals as are parents, they are not ‘objects’ and should never be treated so, but by ease of operations objects are better to deal with as object have no opinions or choices and are devoid of feelings and emotion.
Everything needs to be relooked at and certainly finance is a very major factor, but with this Government and every Government previously finance for social care as never been on their agenda and if it was or is, or put back for when the time is right, when the time is always right and should be a main priority within every Government and not sidestepped when there are other priorities.
Lives are important and no life should be ignored, no matter what the system says, for when individuals are not named, the system is always the backup to blame, rather than changing whatever is wrong in the system. Systems should not and ever be so sacrosanct.
Carer Voice 