For a number of years, the high rate of social work vacancies has led to difficulties across many areas of practice. BASW NI’s engagement with senior leaders in the Health and Social Care Trusts indicates that officially reported vacancy statistics can fail to reflect of the situation in social work teams.
With challenges often most intense in children’s services we have been informed of current vacancy rates in Family Intervention teams of 30-35% and vacancy rates exceeding 40% in Looked After Children’s Services.
This scenario is untenable and perpetuates a cycle of stress and burnout.
Considering changing demography and increasing levels of inequality and poverty, workforce planning is of vital importance to the profession. We need to see commissioning of further social work training places and for social workers to have manageable workloads and caseloads.
It must be recognised, however, that in addition to the requirement for safe staffing models to address the current pressures facing the profession, BASW NI anticipates the need for hundreds of additional social workers to provide services associated with the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act, the roll-out of the forthcoming Adult Protection Bill, and the continued expansion of primary care multidisciplinary teams.
BASW NI is currently engaged with the Office of Social Services and the Department of Health to shape the development and implementation of safe and effective staffing legislation. Our hope is this will provide much needed transparency, scrutiny and enforcement for the social work profession.
In 2022, the Department of Health undertook the Social Work Workforce Review. Its aim was to determine the number of social workers required to meet the needs of the workforce informed by data collection, evidence gathering and analysis of current and projected requirements.
The Social Work Workforce Review identified six Strategic Themes
· Supply
· Safe Staffing
· Workforce Planning
· Workforce Business Intelligence
· Retention
· Workforce Development
These themes were identified as critical to ensuring the provision of a workforce capable of delivering social work services across all sectors in Northern Ireland— including Health and Social Care, Criminal Justice, Education and Voluntary, Community and Independent service providers.
As part of this process, the Social Work Workforce Implementation Board was established. It’s membership comprises senior social work leaders and includes representation from BASW NI. Our role along with partners in this group, is to ensure the actions identified in the Workforce Review are achieved.
In identifying safe staffing as a strategic theme, the Workforce Review recommended “regional consistency… in the numbers, deployment and use of social work practitioners… based on the development of a model to identify normative staffing/safe practice levels for social work services”.
Given the complexity of social work roles, responsibilities and specialisms in practice across programmes of care, working groups were established by the Office of Social Services, on which BASW NI is represented, to look at caseload size and develop safe staffing models for Older People’s Services, Children’s Services and Mental Health Services. Similar projects for other programmes of care are expected in due course.
These working groups have been reporting to the Social Work Workforce Reform Implementation Board and development of Department of Health Regional Safe Staffing Guidance will be produced as an output of this work.
The Department of Health also commissioned research to inform development of safer staffing for older people’s and children’s social work. Reporting its baseline analysis in April 2024, the research identifies the key concepts which underpin safer and effective staffing as Capacity, Communication and Connection.
In Autumn 2024 the Department of Health consulted on Safe and Effective Staffing Legislation in Northern Ireland. BASW NI fully supports legislation for safe and effective staffing in social work and has responded to the consultation outlining a series of issues which need to be taken into account in the development of safe staffing models and supporting legislation. We have submitted our response and will seek further engagement with the Department of Health on these issues.