The following comment was emailed to EdinburghSucks.com – We have opened comments on the article.

I think it’s pretty poor to disable comments, especially for an article as
provocative as your social care dept article.

Co-terminosity is a good thing. It allows much closer working relationships
with health staff, particularly GPs and district nurses. The majority of the
dept’s clients are elderly and have health problems, and good liasion with
health staff is important. Of course, the way the boundaries have been set up
could be better. Children & Families have chosen to use different boundaries,
which isn’t a problem while they’re children, but children grow up and move
into adult services, with no continuity between teams.

The model for this overhaul has been discussed for years, long before Peter
Gabbitas came on the scene. The role of social workers has hardly been changed
at all, other than they don’t have to do duty any more, and most of them hated
duty and were happy to give it up.

Yes, it’s awkward that response and care management teams are not co-located,
but everyone knows that the accommodation available to the dept is lousy, and
has been for years. Your writer appears happy to criticise Gabbitas but hasn’t
mentioned that one of the first things he committed to was a review of the
dept’s accommodation, and I attended several meetings where he openly
acknowledged that many of the buildings staff have to use are “dumps.”

The contact centre is staffed by about a dozen trained customer service
workers, who each had a month’s training before starting work. There were
problems at first, but the quality of their work has improved drastically in
the 4 months it has been operating. There is a social worker and an
occupational therapist there full time, plus a social work manager, and a
worker from a response team is supposed to visit every day, although a lot of
them have decided that they can’t be bothered – happy to criticise the contact
centre but not prepared to come in and help improve it.

Yes, it’s appalling that when clients go into social work offices, they’re
handed the phone and told to ring the contact centre, where one of the already
busy professional staff there will attempt to assess their needs over the
phone, but if those workers phone that office and ask one of the practice team
staff to see the client, they’re generally given short shrift. People are happy
to criticise the dept for setting up this situation, but won’t change their own
behaviour and do the work they’re complaining isn’t done.

The contact centre was not set up overnight either – discussion about it went
on for several years previously, and all the staff had a month’s very intensive
training before it opened, in addition to the many years experience of the
professional staff working there.

Home care managers have a right to feel aggrieved – they were forced into the
contact centre against their will, but they exaggerate the situation. Everyone
in the contact centre who is employed by social care is managed by social care
and has social care terms and conditions, not contact centre terms and
conditions.

The service matching unit is not working well yet, but that doesn’t mean it
will never work. It was ludicrous that at any one time you could have half the
social workers and OTs in the dept each phoning 12 different agencies to get
care packages for umpteen different clients. It makes sense to centralise that,
and although at present it’s not working well, staff’s negative attitudes aren’t
helping.

The union has not “rolled over” – it arranged many, many meetings for members
to discuss the changes and formulate a plan of action – and only half a dozen
people turned up, out of 2000. Staff seem unable to comprehend that “the union”
is not a separate entity which operates on their behalf, it is them, and it is
their responsibility, and if they want the union to do something, they have to
get on and do it.

Swift is not a great system, but it’s not a disaster. It’s clunky, slow and not
intuitive to use, and certainly seems overpriced at £17 million, but for the
first time ever in Edinburgh, all professional staff can see all case notes
without having to wait for paper files to be transferred around the city.
Social care, criminal justice, children and families – all staff can see the
notes they need to, which improves communication. No more having to fax
information to crisis care or ESWS, no more hoping you haven’t missed an alert
or a note – it’s all there, on the system.

The social work dept is the worst funded in Scotland, and nothing has changed
since 1993, everything stagnated, nothing every changed. There is a lot about
Gabbitas I don’t like, but I would much rather have a director who is making
decisions – which can then be argued with and changed if necessary – than one
who does nothing and lets things go on into inertia forever.

Social workers can be forward thinking, committed staff, but this article reads
like it was written by one of the worst sort of workers, who see the negative in
everything and just want to stay and rot until retirement. The department needed
to change. It’s only four months into the change. Let it settle.

I’d like to challenge some of the comments made in the response to the article submitted about changes to the Social Care Dept.

1/ First untruth.Most social workers hated duty.Rubbish.

2/ The role of social workers and how they get the job done has changed significantly.Fact

3/ The writer would rather have’someone who is making decisions’.What about the quality of those decisions?.

4/ The writer makes no comment on the other points made.What about the increased bureaucracy?.What about the fact that social workers are spending more and more time in front of pc’s?.

5/ Damn right the Dept needed change, but not in this way.and certainly not wholesale.

6/Communication has not been improved,its worse.More time spent waiting in tele queues.More links in the chain,therefore more likely that communication breaks down.Much longer to get almost anything done.Confusing access/password arrangements to Swift and Eassess.Fact.Basically more time spent faffing around.

7/ Quality of referrals from the Contact Centre has not improved.It is often very poor.

8/ No apologies for slagging off Unison,they are part of the problem.

9/ Laughably the assumptions made about the attitude/mindset of the writer of the original article are totally off the mark.So much for their ‘assessment skills’.

10/ Social workers contributions at the Contact Centre are often taken as interference, by defensive and nervous employees.Not their fault,an understandable reaction from people who are often out of their depth.

11/ The subtext of this response is that anyone who questions the basis of what is going on is ‘negative’.In contrast to the ‘unquestioning’ positivity of those who don’t!!.Be reminded that ‘meltdown’ is a term being used by middle managers,not the writer of the original article.In fact, their response smacks of a middle management apologist.

12/ There are many positive reasons why these changes need to be challenged.Work them out?.Its not just about ‘Social Care’ comprende??.

One for and All for One
—-
For information and distribution – please pass it on.

« Syndicated from BBC: Shelter report confirms housing squeeze (”Social housing hits 50-year low”)
Scotland’s For Council Housing Demonstration
By scottishtenant
Houses await demolition: an area in limbo.

Houses await demolition: a neighbourhood in limbo.

Backed by the Scottish Tenants Organisation.

In support of tenants in Hamiltonhill fighting for investment in their community.
National Demonstration. Thurs, 24th Sept.Meet 11.am outside M&S in Argyle Street, Glasgow. A special welcome for folks from Edinburgh and Leith.
–
The story was broken to the public at large by the Burgh Angel community newspaper in Glasgow this week, that tenants in Hamiltonhill have been fighting for investment to improve security and safety in the scheme. The Hamiltonhill Action Group is demanding that the GHA fit steel doors to closes in the scheme, as a means of improving the safety and security on the scheme.
Burgh Angel Story: Drawing Steel From Granite; Hamiltonhill Hits Back
[Pdf file]
Tenants in the area have published a manifesto. The seven point programme published by the Action Group, lists the following objectives of the group:-

Hamiltonhill Action Group Programme
* No to forcing people out of their homes. Yes to investment.
* A dry warm home for all.
* A safe, secure community.
* Facilities for children and families must be kept and improved.
* Our homes and our surroundings should be a pleasant place to be.
* Our rents must be affordable, for all of us.
* This is our community. We demand respect!

Have we became such an unequal society that demands such as these are not to be met?
The STO has endorsed requests from local tenants in the area to act on this issue. We are therefore calling for a national demonstration. In the past few months the GHA – the huge and unaccountable stock transfer landlord, whose actions in pursuing rapacious demolitions (more than 20,000 in 7 years; one quarter of its initial stock) in recent years has led in part to the shock news published by Shelter Scotland, that the availability of social housing was at an all time low. Hamiltonhill is another area set aside for demolition. That means it has seen massive underinvestment, as all non-essential investment works have been halted. Hamiltonhill has been in this position of limbo for years.
Isn’t it time that something changed?
Tenants and the STO are now calling a national demonstration, on the 24th of September, to demand investment in public sector housing.

* We demand steel doors for Hamiltonhill. We demand real investment.
* We demand an end to unnecessary demolitions.
* We demand an end to the failed policy of stock transfer.
* We demand an end to right to buy. We demand debt write-off for local authorities, to give council a level playing field.
* We demand that public sector housing is an option of choice. We demand respect, in Hamiltonhill, across Scotland.

Let’s say it loud and clear, “Scotland’s for Council Housing!”
See you on Thursday the 24th of September, in Glasgow.
[Details to follow soon. Please get in touch if you hope to attend: agahst2003[AT]hotmail.com, hamiltonhillaction[AT]googlemail.com]

Tags: Glasgow, Scotland’s for Council Housing, Campaign, Local Association, Hamiltonhill, Burgh Angel, Demonstration.

This entry was posted on August 22, 2009.

The last one is very important, for the sake of keeping everyone safe, from both fire and intruders, good solid doors are very important.