This week was not bad, for me. I was free to do visits, not desk bound and tied to the office as you are on duty, except when there is a crisis. I started doing write ups etc immediately afterwards. It is much easier, though it means I am wondering when to do the stuff I was given earlier...more deciphering of the hieroglyphics called my notes.
And when am I going to upload all the documents I have received? Now that we are paperless, it’s a whole new way of working. I got a half day training in it, but it would takes time and practice for doing this to become automatic and that time I have not been allowed. So I will have to bite the bull by the horns ! and stop the flow of my work to start adding documents to the system. Including about 10 documents I was sent by the FCO on a case.
It’s a heart sinking feeling. I could keep an admin assistant busy for 2 or 3 days a week, and that is what puts so much pressure on me and all of us. So I was up at 1 am one night this week designing forms to support me in doing things efficiently. I do want to feel I am as efficient as possible.... The lure of being seen to cope is so seductive.
But do I really like this efficient me? My lips set in a firm line, that says, don’t mess with me. Head down as I work, not wanting to be interrupted by anyone, including colleagues who need help! But they’ve been getting so busy, they have pretty much stopped “bothering” me. Who wants to interrupt someone who is clearly typing “against the clock?.” I know I don't.
A kind of hardness is setting in. And I see it in the lack of a sense of humour. The fear of speaking the truth. The slight glee that so far, I haven’t been late with an assessment. It is seductive! A strange desire to be so ruthlessly efficient, that nothing is late, that my back is covered, that all the boxes are ticked....Actually helping a child is somehow an extra, to be done if it can be fitted in to my jam packed schedule of minutiae.
So I didn’t feel "bad" this week. Coping? Numb? In denial? In some kind of spiritually protected space where the cares of this life don't really bother me? I am just not sure. And I am not sure it's healthy!
It’s kind of a game, working out the shortest ways of doing things, how to write something so it can be reused, and just “get the freaking work done.” To quote a manager. Or did I imagine that? Perhaps, but it is the attitude.
However yesterday in the kitchen, despite the risk of being interrupted by a manager, and obviously then the sky would fall in, three of us had a chat. Me and two young social workers, qualified about a year. One said our Team Manager wanted her to finish an IA, even when she was off sick. And if you are not in, you will continue to get work allocated to you. She never stops thinking about work. She works till midnight sometimes to get things done.
The other young social worker said she also was struggling and could not keep up with it all. She said she worried about some cases which she thought were child protection, but managers want to minimize everything. But, she said, it is our name on the assessment and we will be blamed if things go wrong.
I said I took some shortcuts, I don’t write case notes about every single thing I do! You could have knocked them down with a feather. One said, but what if something happened? So I then said, well I do write it if it is going to make a difference. But I might write 2 lines not 10 and say “see assessment.” They still looked slightly appalled! I also said what I could about human beings not being perfect. I don't know if it helped....and I was still keen to get on with it, set lips and all.
In Care Space, an online forum for social workers, I am tracking a thread “Stress: Am I Burning Out?” I am definitely not alone in thinking the system is crazy. It’s what to do about it that is beginning to occupy my mind.
Suggestions:
Leave and get less stressful job....
Sue employers
Get Health & Safety in to do an audit.
I think we should tell the government that social workers are not able to cope and are not doing the job we are paid to do, because there is no time to do things properly, no freedom to make proper choices and no respect for us from our own managers.
I also just came across this link to a Guardian series on Work Life Balance http://www.guardian.co.uk/worklifeuk/work-life-balance-uk It reminded me that this is not just about social workers, but we seem not to be mentioned in dispatches. I suppose we are only remembered when something goes very wrong.
In some way just being there is said, in this teaching, to be an important service to offer. I hope so. But there is precious little time to be aware of anything, even though I believe it is vital.....And I did take a short lunch break 3 times this week, just for this reason. Time now to relax and allow myself to be a human being, just being, or who does things at a human pace, not a human being trying her best to be a robotic human information processor.
And as I've mentioned Sufis, here is a poem by the wondrous Rumi. Nurture for the soul.
Only Breath
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
From Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks
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