4 minute read
SOCIAL WORK SUPERVISION MUST BE MORE THAN JUST A CASE UPDATE
I have often written about how social workers can be severely damaged by secondary trauma and the subject is commonly discussed on my Facebook page and its linked group.
We deal with so much pain and suffering that it is unrealistic to expect us not to become drained by what we must endure. Over time, this constant negativity can lead to even the most compassionate and caring of people becoming cynical and jaded.
When I’ve raised this issue in the past, many people have gotten in touch to say how they’ve been affected by compassion fatigue in their own practice. Many have also shared how it was a significant driving factor behind their burnout and low mood.
This is where I believe that real therapeutic supervision can come into its own, helping us resolve secondary trauma, let go of pain, and move on in our work with renewed purpose.
I’ve found a common theme with all my managers that supervision was more of a clerical than a clinical activity. Even my own time as a team manager found me working with supervision forms and processes that did not lend themselves to therapeutic support of my social workers - the focus of data being firmly rooted in when children were last seen, how plans were progressing, and what their current views and wishes were.
Generally speaking, the focus of supervision within contemporary social work practice tends to be on case progression, report deadlines, recording of data, and planning. There’s very little opportunity for exploring emotions.
When I speak to colleagues all over the world, their experiences are the same. More worrying than that, a significant number of people tell me that they rarely get supervision at all. This is especially concerning when considered in the context that many failings in social work are linked to poor managerial oversight.
Coming back to my own experiences, I am unable to lay any blame on my managers for the lack of depth in supervisions or the scarcity of space to freely explore my feelings in a manner akin to counselling. Without fail, every one of my managers has been dedicated, committed, intelligent, empathetic, and hard-working; already online when I log on in the morning, and always the last to switch off their laptops at night.
When I have managed a team of my own, I have found there is neither the time nor system in place to support therapeutic supervision. Overseeing a team of relatively new social workers each with 30 cases or thereabouts, there was so much to discuss in terms of case management that the impact of vicarious trauma became something to be squeezed in as and when.
Further to this, there was no formal training on how to support the wellbeing of social workers and no structure in place to do so - save for the blanket policy of a referral to the internal wellbeing services via HR.
My experience as a manager was far from unique. It is simply, and ever so bluntly, just how things are done in social work these days. Instead of giving social workers the support that the exacting toll placed upon them by social work requires, the demands of the system force them to dedicate their supervision time to a series of administrative tasks - following a generic template of closed questions that offer little scope for free-thinking. When was the person last seen? When was the last review meeting? Have you completed the task list from last month? What are your tasks for this month?
The knock-on effect of this is that social workers are losing possibly the only chance they have to address secondary trauma, offload pain, and seek to resolve the internal crises that expedite leading them to either bottle up emotions, or turn to negative coping mechanisms.
Research from SCIE shows that good quality supervision gives people better job satisfaction, creates more committed workers, and reduces turnover. The research findings go on to reveal that inadequate supervision poses a threat to confidence, competence, capacity, workforce stability, and morale.
Supervision’s effect on both the individual and wider workforce is clear, so why is it increasingly being reduced to a series of administrative tasks and case updates?
If managers aren’t going to be freed from the shackles of repetitive data tasks or given smaller teams to manage, then organisations need to bring in external counsellors who can offer therapy sessions to social workers. A system of applying formal work-based supervision and counselling concurrently would create both the audit trail needed to avoid case delay and the truly reflective therapeutic support needed to resolve secondary trauma.
There is something clearly amiss in social work when those working in private industries can readily access free counselling at work, yet we are expected to endure witnessing extreme abuse with little to no support in coping with it all.
Even the best helpers need helping themselves now and then.
Our regular columnist, Social Work Tutor, publishes his blogs each week on www.mysocialworknews.com
