Rose
Social Worker
The biggest changes that I've noticed in childrens and families in Haringey over the last couple of years are mainly there’s a, management structure’s a lot more open, a lot more approachable, that goes from team managers up to senior team managers, to service managers, assistant directors. Just as a trainee I know that I can go and approach any of those and ask for case direction, or advice on anything that I'm doing in my work and that’s been a real positive move forward I think.
I guess the changes over the last year, the biggest change for me has been that management are a lot more approachable, a lot more open and that’s impacted my work because I'm able to get a lot more case direction off of different people, particularly in terms of going to a panel to ask for resources for a case, it’s been really useful when the managers have known about the case and they're able to advocate for the clients a lot more and I think that the service users get a better service from us in that respect.
I think that we are asked and we are able to contribute to improvements of Haringey, I think as a work force we’re often, we’re involved in forums, we’re often asked for feedback on surveys and questionnaires, that we get the responses from, we get the results of those surveys back to us and we can see real changes that have happened as a result. I also think that we’re able to make real improvements to the delivery and the provision of our service that we offer and particularly in terms, in my experience if something, a way that a service has been delivered, if I have thought maybe it could be altered, I have approached managers about that and there has been changes in that and I feel really empowered to be able to make those suggestions to do that.
I think to make a good social worker I think you need to be able to empathise, I think you need to be able to really care, you need to be able to see things from very different perspectives and you need to be able to advocate and analyse, have really good analytical skills in your assessments. I think those are kind of a base of the qualities that you need as a social worker. I think in Haringey on top of all of those you definitely also need to be really passionate, you need to be able to have really good communication skills with all the different client groups that we work with, I think you really need to be able to advocate and I think more than anything you need to have a backbone and you need to be able to face challenges that Haringey present. So my future in Haringey, I'm really looking forward to qualifying which I'm going to do quite soon, I'm then looking forward to becoming part of the newly qualified social worker scheme in Haringey, they’ve got a lot of career development put into that recently and I'm looking forward to being part of that team and really developing through that. Then after a year I’ll qualify as a social worker and really looking to being a fully qualified social worker in Haringey and also seeing the structure in the workforce of Haringey becoming a lot more permanent and more stable as it has been over recent months.
For people coming to work in Haringey I would say that if you're ready for a challenge, you're ready to work with people from diverse backgrounds with extraordinary different amount of needs, different circumstances, you're willing to advocate to people, to really fight people’s corner that might have people to do that for them, then come and work in Haringey.
