It is not surprising that the profession lacks confidence, it is undervalued by government, it is blamed for,"bed blocking," dismissed by many in the NHS as an irrelevance, social workers are the agents of social services one of the NHS minor partners and as a consequence have low status. This has been the situation for a number of years what's different now is that social workers employers, the local authorise also seem to place little value in the need for the skills of the profession as they go about cutting social work posts and replaced them with unqualified workers. Even the directors of adult social care appear to devalue the work many of whom can be heard telling colleagues that in the future local authorities won't employ any social workers they will instead be working for private companies like Virgin Care or health care cooperatives. This view seems to be shared by the ADASS who appear to have lost faith in the profession, whilst they lobby for increased funding for adult social care they are silent on replacing social workers with unqualified or health staff and the "out sourcing " of social work.
The implications of this for the profession are that this becomes a self fulling prophecy in that what directors believe will happen happens because they are the ones cutting the posts and outsourcing the service. There will still be a social work profession it just won't be in the public sector.
Blair McPherson ex social worker, former director of community services, author and bloggerwww.blairmcpherson.co.uk
