The GSCC has published a ‘research’ report on how social workers might stick to their professional boundaries better. Prepared by a user advocacy organisation called Witness, which seems from its website to be in administration (ie broke), it contains some good sense.

However, as a piece of research it is lacking: there is no clue about how or why it was commissioned, nothing about who these people are who are telling us what to do, unchecked and unquestioned user views presented as gospel and the height of perceptive analysis. It seems to have been mainly about people with the rather specialised experience of social workers in community mental health teams, but this is generalised to apply to everyone in social care. This is in the tradition, therefore, of a lot of so-called research from organisations with a vested interest in slagging off professionals without carrying out coherent research to support what they are doing. It’s also not clear who these people are, because the website gives you no clue about who the trustees or staff were.

I agree there is a problem with getting at the views of users who have lost their trust in professionals, and going to relevant user organisations is an important way of gaining access to them. But because their job is to represent the interests and views of the users who’ve been wronged, it’s hard to feel that well-constructed, unbiased and effective research is going to emanate from them. After all, their role in life is to be on the side of the wronged user, not to consider fairly the issues. Apparently the GSCC also commissioned a university also to do a project drawing on professional sources, some of which this report uses to slag off the university research. You can’t help feeling that the GSCC would have done better to spend some real money on a proper research project, using Witness’s expertise (if it has any, it’s not clear), because they’re right to say this is an under-researched area.

So where does the good sense come from? By getting some genuine experience from users, of course; as they say, a few genuine quotations can tell you a lot (actually they say ‘quotes’, but I’m into improving people’s English). You can always learn something even from individual experiences, because an individual experience makes clear how it felt and what might be done better, there are always things you can generalise to improve practice. Also, some parts of the research seem to have been reasonably well-constructed (the methods are not entirely clear, particularly the selection of respondents – a constant bane of consumer research by interested organisations). It got people to discuss scenarios about what is acceptable and unacceptable boundary-crossing, even if some of the personal interviews seem mainly to have been about eliciting well-rehearsed complaints.

A big problem is that that social workers and their agencies don’t make clear who they are and what their job is. This is not exactly a surprise, in part because social workers are presented as evil busybodies by most of the press, so they’re often a bit cautious in spelling out who they are and also in part because what they do is complicated and hard to explain. In mental health, there is an element of checking up on things (risk management as some people might like to call it), and it can be hard to explain this without putting yourself in a negative light. Some well-considered information leaflets and a good introductory session are important resources that many services that include social workers do not seem to have got right yet.

Then, people worried about blabbing around the so-called multiprofessional team. Even if you say, as we do at St Christopher’s, that information is shared with the team, there is a matter of ‘need to know’; all the doctors and nurses do not need to know the full details of someone’s private life. And leaving your calling card openly in a multi-occupied block of flats, or shouting out who you are through the letter box will not endear you to people trying to survive the stigma of mental ill-health, a particular issue for these respondents.

It’s also important to make clear what control service users have in particular situations.

I did have a lot of sympathy with some of the responses to one of the scenarios: you were distressed in a meeting/in private, so your social worker gave you a hug. In public is perhaps ok, according to some of the views of people who had not been ill-used by social workers (but not by those who had). My birth family did not do social hugs and kisses, and I certainly find it disconcerting that a lot of women social workers seem to think a natural form of greeting and leavetaking is to give total strangers a hug and kiss. It isn’t in many people’s lives, and especially it isn’t if you’re a man. One of the very earliest things I was taught in residential child care is to be absolutely clear that you’re not touching clients; and if you are, make sure there are reliable witnesses about what you had to do and why. I’ve always been grateful for the feeling of safety provided by that guidance, and judging by many of the comments here, so have the people I’ve worked with over the years. You can be empathetic without being touchy-feely.

The report: Parker P. J. (2009) Professional Boundaries in Social Work: A Qualitative Study. London: Witness.

On the web at: http://www.gscc.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/A6E02A21-9B89-4841-B243-F87AF3DFC6A7/0/Professional_Boundaries_in_Social_Work.pdf

Witness website: http://www.popan.org.uk/index.htm