In a generally thoughtful article, but one with which I had
a number of disagreements, Annie Hudson, chief executive of the College of
Social Work, examines some of the implications of the Daniel Pelka tragedy.
My most fundamental difference of opinion with her concerns
her comment:
“… the SCR pointed to workload and resource pressures across different children's services. These are part of the context, though they cannot excuse poor practice. However, we ignore them at our peril” (my emphasis).
We do ignore them at our peril and sadly they are part of
the context and, in my view, workload and resource pressures often do
excuse poor practice.
People who are over burdened are likely to make more
mistakes. Research [1] and commonsense tell us that people whose workloads are
excessive will not perform to the appropriate standards. Overwork results in undue
stress and undue stress degrades performance. Would you want to fly on an
airline where the pilots were chronically overworked?
The elephant in the room in many serious case reviews is
that the organisations providing the services were experiencing a variety of
problems resulting in overworked and stressed people delivering services as
well as they could, but at an unacceptably low standard.
None of us should be giving policy makers any more excuses
for not resourcing child protection well. Adequate resourcing is a necessary,
if not sufficient, condition of a safe service.
Note
[1] See for example Morgan, B. and Bowers, C. (1995) “Teamwork
stress: implications for team decision making”. In Guzzo and Salas (eds) Team
Effectiveness and Decision Making in Organizations Sanfrancisco: Jossey
Bass.
