Over the years I have probably had more contact with the
upper echelons of the British civil service than most people. In a variety of
contexts I have had to deal with civil servants in the Home Office, the
Department of Health and the Department for Education.
I was therefore very interested to read an article in the Independent that speaks of a ‘snake pit’
and ‘poisonous’ culture in the civil service that rejects outsiders. Apparently
a report prepared for Government has found that senior officials are resistant
to change and care more about process than results. Civil service structures
are described as ‘unnecessarily hierarchical’.
Sadly I have to say that this reflects much of my experience
of trying to persuade officials to consider various ways of improving child
protection. Recent attempts by groups I work with to get some discussion of
simple and cost effective ways of making practice safer through better
understanding of how mistakes happen, and how a human factors perspective can
help reduce and mitigate error, have fallen on what may only be called stony
ground. A common response I have received involves endless, torturous, but
ultimately fallacious, arguments against change and innovation combined with
high-sounding statements that something similar is already being done, even
when it manifestly is not. The impression I gained was that I was dealing with
a small group of people whose jobs consist solely of finding reasons for doing nothing.
I was recently involved in preparing one paper arguing that
Serious Case Reviews are poor guides to learning from mistakes and proposing a
more promising alternative – critical incident reporting. After a long
correspondence we were eventually assured that the problems we raised were already
being dealt with – by Serious Case Reviews! We despaired.
