THE SOCIAL WORKER. PART 6

Keeping upto date with all they have to do is an impossible task for many social workers, and at times they are likely to feel overwhelmed by it all.

And now you have your caseload and is responsible for organising, prioritising , planning and managing them as efficiently and effectively as you can. There are policies, procedures and practices with which you have to make yourself au fait. You are now a practising social work practitioner aspiring to become a competent practitioner. All those years you have spent at university acquiring the essential information, knowledge and skill about the profession, the people you will be working with and their needs and problems, about government policies, law and how society functions. All of this, you now have to use to inform your practice. 

When the social worker's plans work out, the sense of satisfaction can be elevating.

Your quest to make a positive difference to the lives of people whose living circumstances result in them requiring your support to help them to manage their lives, and care for their children, better than they would have done, without the intervention of your agency.

One of the biggest problem many social workers have, during their practice, is that of consistently allocating their time between their case loads, and between the different tasks they need to perform on each of their cases, in order to achieve the planned outcomes on each.

Planning, organising and managing your limited working hours and allocating them to your cases is a very complex and elusive challenge for most, if not all social workers. No sooner had you planned and allocated how you are going to use your time, tomorrow and the coming days, than you go into work only to find that that you have to change your plans. 

Probably because one of your colleagues has not turned up, or is having a terrible day with ‘all their cases blowing up’, and you having to help them or stand in for another colleague who is helping them.  Or that you have to make a child protection visit with another colleague, or go to court to apply for an Emergency Protection Order, because a child on your caseload has suffered a serious injury during the night, which raises child protection issues.

While many social workers might relish the adrenaline associated with such urgent tasks, after they are have been dealt with, they still have the frustration of trying to achieve the impossible task of keeping upto date with all of their varied and numerous 'must do tasks', and the probably inevitable accounting to their managers for 'why they have not done them, or done them within the procedural time-scales.'

The social worker has to become very skilled at managing the different strings they have to work with and coordinate to achieved planned outcomes.