This was the title of our recent presentation at JSWEC [the UK Joint Social Work Education and Research Conference]. It’s a comment made by many social workers so we felt it was important to emphasise the way in which the ‘written record’ seems to override everything else – but how realistic is it to think that a written record can capture everything a social worker does?
Two social workers taking part in WiSP presented with us (not mentioning their names here until permission is given by their agencies and by them) which was great – not only because of the important points they made in the presentation (see social worker views) but because in preparing for the conference we had some really good discussions about the way in which writing can detract from other important work….and the possible consequences for services to users…
In the presentation we presented some initial findings on several key themes
– the amount of time spent on writing
– the range of types of writing that social workers are doing
– the impact of digital technologies on the writing that social workers are doing
We also discussed the challenges of measuring accurately time spent on writing because writing is nested within so many tasks and takes place alongside discussions, meetings, visits, phone calls…but we did offer a calculation based on the writing logs of 6 social workers as you can see in the graph (we’ll be writing more about calculations at a later point….