The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC)
is the body which for the last few years has had
responsibility for regulating social work in England.
It was not long ago – October 2017 to be
precise - that I found myself feeling a glimmer of hope with regard to the
HCPC. It seemed that there might be an embryonic recognition there that
punishing people for errors made in good faith was a bad idea.
But the new year dawns with my hopes laid
waste. Two recent HCPC tribunals seem to have continued in the established
tradition of putting in the boot, instead of acting in ways consistent with
creating safer services.
In one case a social worker for the elderly
has been suspended for six months because, according to the HCPC her “…. assessment,
the care plan, communication and record keeping fell far below what would be
proper in the circumstances, and represents a serious departure from the
standards expected of a registered social worker”.
In another case a children’s social work
manager has been sanctioned for practice failings despite clear evidence of an
inordinately heavy caseload, poor working conditions and inadequate management
support.
These
are not cases with which the regulator should be dealing. They are not cases of
egregious behaviour. Rather they represent the failings of an overloaded system
creaking under the pressure. The people concerned should not be blamed and
punished. The systems under which they are working should be examined and
improved. The causes of poor practice – not individual failings but systematic
organisational weaknesses – need to be understood.
By
making an example of hapless individuals, who happen to be caught out by the
systems around them, the HCPC is doing nobody any favours. By stoking up the
blame culture the net effect is to make services less safe and of lower
quality. That’s because professionals who constantly feel under threat of unjust
punishment will always find it hard to co-operate with others to uncover the
true causes of poor services. And, as a result, those causes will continue to
be undiscovered and unaddressed.
