Workers Services

Oh look, I have post. No handwritten name and address: of course not, it’s not my birthday and I only write to my Great Aunt Betty once every couple of months. It’s a letter from my bank, and look it’s telling me how valued I am as a customer, how nice. Well at least they’ve spelt my name appropriate, I guess I’d expect that seeing as it’s all been processed by a computer. And look, it’s been personally signed by the Executive Director! Oh, no, wait, of course it’s scanned, how silly of me.

No, I genuinely don’t react like that each time my mail arrives. In fact, I’ve come to take our depersonalised culture entirely for granted. We’ve all been engulfed by mechanical bureaucracy for so long that it doesn’t even happen to us so come across it strange.

In most professions, the consequences are null and void, but for qualified social workers and others who work every day with men and women in want, the effects can be really draining. Locums’ social work involves working in varying fields of the social care sector. Locums see a vast and varying range of people day in, day out, and assist them with their issues. For men and women in such a person centred career it should appear alien to have to deal with so much paperwork, documenting your days work into a faceless file that can never fully communicate what you have just seen and performed.

A London based social care recruitment business is making efforts to create a community amongst its candidates, arranging frequent events to bring their candidates together. Those of us who invest our days in an office may possibly never fully grasp the need that qualified social workers have to care for others. It is crucial that these essentially social and sociable beings have the chance to share and vocalise their achievements. Depersonalisation is merely not an option.