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??.