Re stating the obvious but doing it differently

Re stating the obvious but doing it differently

I know that what I am about to write might be familiar to many of you but I thought I would share this for two reasons. One is that although familiar it is still worth an airing and secondly I feel that using this blog, and Twitter to get it out into the public space is what blogging and tweeting is all about.

On Wednesday I was at a pre placement meeting for a second year Masters student in a community care team in a large Scottish local authority. It was an ideal placement, the student is doing their dissertation on direct payments and wanted a placement like this to link all the final year strands. The practice teacher was an independent and had worked as a senior social worker in community care in the same local authority for many years and the link worker was a very experienced social worker.

During the meeting we were discussing the importance of a second placement student being able to identify some of the organisational and cultural aspects of the placement and link these to the theory and practice. The link worker illustrated this using an example of a resource allocation group, she told the student there were weekly RAG’s as the demand for residential placements was high. The meetings used to be on a weekly basis but nursing homes were not prepared to wait. If they had beds and social workers were delayed in accessing the RAG the beds they wanted were given away so the RAG moved to a weekly basis to prevent beds being given away in this manner.

We discussed how this could be linked to the increasing marketisation of social work and bemoaned the bureaucratic nature of the profession, this led to the practice teacher reminding us all of the bygone days of resource transfer monies  (the monies NHS gave to local authorities to provide non hospital care based care packages) there was a warm glow in the room recalling these salad days and a sense of annoyance at where we were at now.

Of course these reminiscences were definitely of the rose tinted variety and there were challenges and issues then, perhaps the power of the private sector now was about our own willingness to commission them then and we are now reaping the benefits of paying that particular piper. There are other considerations about the “then” as well but that is straying from the point.

Just before going out to his meeting I was looking at a paper written by Arthur Midwinter around the time of local government re-organisation in Scotland. In it he quoted Iain Laing the then Secretary of State for Scotland who was promoting the shift away from Strathclyde Regional Council to smaller ”unitary” authorities. One of the arguments he was advancing was that the move to local authorities would decrease buearocracy and increase choice for service users and social workers (carers were not as prominent then but he would have meant them as well)

Considering that view now makes for some interesting thoughts. Weekly RAG’s? Care homes giving beds away on the basis of occupancy rates as opposed to “need” the complicated arrangements between care purchaser and providers? The dynamic of registration, inspection and ongoing professional development for workers? The economies of scale argument? All of these issues suggest to me that the development of new policy approaches inevitably bring with them the development of new arrangements to support and implement them. Unitary smaller authorities will (also) inevitably develop particular arrangements to support these based on the political, social and geographic make up of the authorities.

And now finally here is my point and indeed the point of writing this particular blog entry. The advancement of localism in all its forms contains a threat that workers become “localised” and become experts in the local environments that they operate within. This approach undoubtedly has its strengths but a potential weakness is that workers lose a big picture approach. The critical debates that go on in one particular local area will be similar to the debates in others and there is to me a risk that workers become insular. That is where this form of media offers real possibilities. My own increased blogging activity has come about as I feel there is a need to advance some of these debates and this platform is ideal for doing so.

At the end of the meeting I felt disappointed that I could offer no solution to the creeping increase in privatised, market led services or the increase in the process developed to support and possibly promote these approaches, if anyone can offer any insights I would love to hear them. What I could do was use this blog to raise them and encourage others to join the debate. In this case social media offers a powerful global engagement tool that can counteract some of the negative elements of localism.