Social workers put themselves at risk to help others in need

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 16 November 2022

Social workers have risked their own health and wellbeing to help families during Covid lockdowns, the BASW England Conference heard.

Rick Hood, Professor of Social Work at Kingston University, specialises in how systems affect welfare inequalities and services for children and families.

He told the conference: “Ethnographic research carried out through the pandemic showed that practitioners often risked their own health and wellbeing to carry out their work while adapting to the changing conditions of practice and responding to the hardships and adversities faced by families and crucially, pressures on people who were struggling to cope.

“They were often in overcrowded and poor quality housing, having lost support networks cut off during lockdown.”

Prof Hood said the pressures on families were seen as contextual and not of people's own making during the pandemic. The same perspective needed to apply now as food and fuel insecurity rises, he stressed.

Prof Hood also emphasised the importance of improving lives through social policy, by ensuring a fair and accessible welfare system.

“We desperately need a joined up social policy which improves the material conditions in which families live.

“Policies which increase a family’s income through tax and benefits regimes or providing free childcare can also reduce the rate of children admitted to out-of-home care.

“A decade of austerity and the push towards late intervention means rising poverty and increased pressure on services, which will then operate screening and rationing designed to hold people away from help.”

Prof Hood highlighted how rates of children admitted to care are ten times higher in the ten per cent most deprived areas of England than the most affluent, with similar figures for admissions to psychiatric hospitals, adult safeguarding interventions or rates of long-term residential care for older people.

He said: “As deprivation increases more households are dragged into deep poverty and financial precarity, and rates of demand increase across the board. Resources vary inversely to need, and spending cuts have hit poorest areas hardest.

“Agencies in deprived areas have to ration more strictly and agencies in rich areas will focus more heavily on poor families.

Pointing to the importance of practice frameworks and specialist training, Prof Hood said: “We need systems that are oriented towards support rather than just risk assessment and late intervention.”