Talking to my friends

It’s amazing what you learn from your friends, when you start to ask them about care.

My friend Paula has encountered the less friendly face of social work recently. Her grandmother is starting to show early signs of dementia, and it’s got to the stage where she shouldn’t really be alone all the time. Her grandmother lives in the Lake District, and has lived in the same house for years.

Over the past few months, Paula has been to visit her gran several times to sort out various bits and pieces. She’s found that her gran is starting to lose her memory, and will go to the post office 3 or 4 times a day. Sometimes just for the company.

Paula is concerned that nobody is keeping an eye on her, but she can’t move closer, and her parents live in Canada.

Her father flew over to come and try to get more formal care in place. They arranged for a social worker to come. According to Paula, the social worker was there for less than an hour, in which time she decided that Paula’s gran was fine. The social worker said they could arrange their own private care if they wanted someone to come in every day to check on her gran.

Paula certainly felt this fell short of the mark.

Contrast this to the conversation I recently had with a friend’s mother, who is an ex social worker. She said she really felt social workers were drowning under all the different assessments and mounds of paperwork they are now required to fill in. How, she argued, could social workers do their job when they were increasingly desk bound?

Yet before she retired, she was managing to maintain such good relations with many of her service users to the extent that she invited some of them to her leaving party. Her comment was that no matter what accusations are levelled at social workers, she has yet to meet one who isn’t totally devoted to the job and who does anything other than work exceptionally hard.

Fascinating.