Professional status

Here is something from a recent case I was involved with. It made me wonder about the professional status of social workers.

A social worker wanted to return a three-year-old child to his parents after a knee-jerk PPO, the child was desperate to return home, he wasn’t eating at foster carers and was seen running alone in the street and had received bruises while in foster care. The (experienced) social worker could not make the decision to return the child home, although all core group members felt it was appropriate and were offering support. She felt that this was the proper course of action and yet the decision had to be made by her manager and then signed off by the service manager. This was in the middle of the holiday season – so far it has taken eight weeks – the bruises keep occurring.

As a social worker I have been fighting for professional status, which means that I am empowered to take responsibility for some decision making of my own. I act and can justify my actions. It is well known that the further away you are from a case, the more harsh you are likely to be, and as the closest one to the case, the decision should be mine, I know the case, all my manager knows is what I am able to communicate. If my manager therefore disagrees it is not because of their greater knowledge, but because of their fear/prejudice/lack of understanding.

Can somebody tell me if this is common practice these days?

The Care Standards people are very fast to strike off a social worker but I have yet to read about a case where a manager has been struck off for overloading a worker with an unfeasible amount of work, or for providing shoddy, useless supervision, or bullying, hectoring social workers into taking just one more case.

Obvious there is a lot of unexplored depth to this issue, the worker in this case was very experienced and a less experienced worker would require more support ...