If I look for coverage of palliative care and pallcare social work in the documents on social work from the Task Force and the DCSF Select Committee, this would be a very short post. Instead, I ask what we might say about their absence from consideration.

One point is that, although I know from personal contacts that palliative care social workers are sometimes hard to find for hospices and pallcare teams across the country, I also know there have been some ace appointments of really fine staff in recent months too, not least here at St Christopher’s. So perhaps pallcare is not in the crisis of job vacancies and work pressure that local authority social work experiences. It has always been the case that people have often started their careers in general social work, built up a good range of experience quickly in busy general departments, found out what really interests them in their career and then moved towards a specialist area that really allowed them to develop their skills and their contribution. The accusation then is sometimes that they are moving out of the kitchen into the sunny uplands of less pressure. On the other hand, I do not know a lot of social workers who think pallcare social work is a doddle; interesting, yes, satisfying, yes, but also dealing with difficult human issues at a time of real crisis in people’s lives which all of us at some time in our lives do not want to face. No, a lot of students and colleagues say, I think I’ll stay with the care management or child protection.

Also, social work’s way of applying general principles in all settings means that you don’t get stuck. One of our medical consultants said to me enviously a little while ago how lucky social workers are to be able to move between specialties, taking a high level of skill with them, and learning new information about their new area. I’m a little cautious about this. Talking to a very experienced social worker about some research on groupwork that I’ve been doing recently, it was clear that some of the findings about issues discussed by bereaved carers in the groups reflected her experience over twenty years, but had clearly been new to the groupworker, who has moved medical specialties. So you have to look at the specialised areas, in this case responses to bereavement, and identify where the specialised knowledge is, and what is more general that can be transferred.

So the failure of these reports to think about social work’s small-scale specialties and the knowledge that is required for them is one important weakness in these reports; they need to look at the interaction between general and specialist and see where they can foster each other’s progress. It’s understandable that the government is looking at the big services that it is responsible for itself. But thinking about the profession as a whole, it has a duty also to think about how it can build, retain and train for the myriad of specialist areas in social work. And there is a payback, too. The building of specialist knowledge and skills feeds back into the regard for social work in the community, and the store of skills in the profession. Several of our really good pallcare social workers have moved back into child protection, adult services, mental health or general hospital social work in recent years. It renews their interest and commitment to work in a new area and they will take their resilience in helping with powerful human emotions and knowledge of dying and bereavement into those areas too. We are always pleased to employ a mix of people from children and families, mental health and adult services work coming in the other direction, because it enriches the services we offer, too.

What the social work specialities also show, and pallcare social work is a prime example, is that imaginative human helping is entirely possible, valid and worthwhile as part of our services. All social work does not have to be bureaucratic and rule-bound. Let a little imagination in and official social work can be human helping too. One of the weaknesses of the statement about social work written for the general public in the Task Force document is that it focuses very much on the individualised, concrete, risk averse things that you can say social workers provide and, in the cause of public understanding, does not convey the richness that social work may contain. Pallcare social workers, and many others working in specialist areas, can claim to be demonstrating that richness every day.