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for those who recieve(d) the service of social services
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
right... i have never heard anyone talk about their experiences with social services in a good way. it seems to me nobody has a good word to say about them, although everyone bad mouths them at the first opportunity. okay so, personally, i do hate them and have done since i was a lot younger so i am also a person who has nothing good to say about them from experience. anyway... what occurred to me today was, does anyone have a good thing to say about social services? has anyone ever had a good experience with social services? and also just out of interest given the above it also occurred to me as to why would anyone want to become a social worker - or is that they just randomly think they could do some good? what do you think about social services... this is a purely random question btw but i'd be interested to hear some replies.
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Don't know why people would want to work for them though.
but surely, social services are concerned with social problems and their causes, and as such will only become involved in cases where there is a problem.
This being so, anyone who has had any dealings with social services is likely to have been experiencing "problems" (whatever they may be, from a huge list of things), and as such is more likely to have bad things to say about that period of their life than good things.
although that's merely a guess.
I think that is probably true in a lot of cases. But it's very interesting that this topic has come up as just last night I was out with a social worker at a party and one of her clients from about ten years ago came up to her to tell her how great she was, and how well she has been doing recently.
It often depends on what situation people are involved in, very few people tend to have good things to say at the time, for example, about the social workers who work in child protection or emergency duty social workers. But they are often the people asked to do some of the very worst parts of social work.
On the other hand, many people I know have been helped with issues around disability support, dementia care, elderly care or terminal illness. The circumstance is all I guess.
But as to why people choose to do it - if you're asking about services like child protection, I couldn't honestly tell you - little pay, huge workload, and few thanks for the work they do doesn't seem to be the ideal work package. I guess some people do, thankfully, believe they can help.
Its not a bed of roses though, its difficult work, people don't want you involved in their lives for whatever reasons, theres not enough resources or funding, departments are overstretched etc but when you realise that you've helped someone live their life the way they want to, this makes you feel really good, and there are people out there that are appreciative of the help that social services give. And thats why i've chosen to go in to it, is that there are people that need help or support out there in one way or another, and i think they should be given the chance to access it.
I my mum also never has a good word to say about them, as a lot of her patients are in need of social services support and don't get it. Yet she gets lots of hassle from them wanting details of a couple of her patients appointments so they can fight a court case.
They must do some good but they really don't have a good reputation for it and I can think of 2 foster kids I know now who are going to become part of that fantastic statistic about kids in case who end up in jail, purely because Social Services let them down.
Although I'm only admin its still a very important role considering that alot of the social workers dont really know how to use a computer and often throw things into scanning that really dont need to be scanned.
Thing is I can see things from both sides of the story...My family was/is involved with SS because my sister has autism. My sisters first SWorker told my parents that it would be for the best to put me into the care system so they could devote 100% of their attention to my sis. When I found this out I was not impressed to say the least.
And my mate recently had her kids put on the CPRegister cos a nurse thought a bump on her (just learning how to walk so was falling all over the place) baby, was a sign of abuse. and since that her bourgh have been arses to her and not provideing reports, not giving dates of when baby was due to return home, cancelling meetings last min and not imforming her. But then this borough are shit and its to be expected from them.
Looking at it from the veiw I have in my job, I can see how easy it is to make mistakes, admin not updating an address, or a warning flag not being taken off, or being put on by mistake can make the SWorker look like a blithering idiot. Also if the filing system hasnt been updated and files go missing, we (as clients) expect out SWorkers to remember who we are, why we were fisrt referred to SS and what progress we have made, just off the top of thier head just they have only just been assigned to our case when in reality the SWorker has 15 other cases to remember stuff for too.
Ok my rant is over and I shall go and read everybody elses replys now...
My mum has to liase (sp?) with social workers a lot through her job (she's a behaviour support teacher) and does come across a lot of crap ones, but I think mainly they get stuck with the system being how it is and stuff.. she does come across very good and helpful ones as well.
Personally I'd never consider being a social worker cos it must be very stressful and the general view of them seems to be that they're crap... it would be hard to cope with. You'd probably also see a lot of bad things happening that you could do little to help with tbh. :yeees: