The experience of doing duty

Duty was seen in the team as a very important and stressful area of decision making in the work. None of the social workers said they liked doing duty. One of the workers summed it up:

I think duty can be really stressful because it can get really, really busy and you’re constantly having to read through those referrals and you are constantly having to prioritise and make decisions with your duty manager about what needs responding to a-s-a-p and what can wait and then, apart from all the referrals, you get the constant battles with the professionals who think that your thresholds are completely different to theirs and it’s about getting other professionals to understand about risk, and about significant harm and about whether or not it can be worked at a lower level than... us...(SW6)

The sheer volume of referrals, the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of duty work, the constant concern that something really awful was going to come in necessitating a stressful investigation, the arguments and dilemmas over where thresholds for intervention lay and the reliance on colleagues and the Duty Manager to help you feel safe were frequent themes. Having to work with cases or visit families who were not known to you was seen as particularly stressful and demanding.

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I ask SW7 if she likes duty. She says no, you can’t control it. Too much coming in. You might come in to 3 pages of “contact-ins” (referrals) and you’ve got to clear them all. It’s not like your own work she says, you can control the pace of it better, prioritise. With duty you don’t know what’s going to happen next (field note extract).

At the beginning of another observed duty I noted the work awaiting the duty worker:

Workdesk (the computer screen): 13 cases open. Half are red requiring immediate action (field note extract).

Of course this was the workload before the duty session began when more cases would come in rapidly. Observing another duty I noted:

SW5 comments to me how stressful today has been as when she came in there were 15 cases on the workdesk. She says it’s stressful because “you’re in and out of different cases, managing information and managing risk”. Now there are more yellows (today’s cases) on the workdesk and even where it’s all one family each child has to have a different referral form...SW5 looks at the workdesk – “new cases...you have to keep it in your head who you’ve seen”. (field note extract)

There was a student in the team on placement. He had his own caseload but the team did not allow him to do duty until relatively late on in his placement and then he acted as assistant to one of the regular social workers. About 3-4 weeks before his placement ended he was allowed to “take the lead” in a duty session (with another team member alongside him - he was never placed formally on the “duty rota”) an indicator of how difficult this aspect of the work was seen to be.

The duty and assessment team saw themselves as rather special and this was often raised in team meetings and informal team talk. They contrasted their job – taking all the new referrals, having a constant input of fresh cases – with that of other teams such as the longer term teams they shared an office with who they felt could work at a slower pace, hold cases for longer, put off closing cases which meant they could not then take on cases that the duty team were ready to pass on. This meant duty team cases piled up – they couldn’t get rid of older cases but they couldn’t stop taking new ones. This talk was frequently shaped around “atrocity stories” (Dingwall, 1977) about senior managers, other professionals such as doctors, head teachers and health visitors and other social workers. This all seemed to function as a way of asserting the teams identity and solidarity and their assumption of collegial competence (Pithouse, 1998) though as time went on it became increasingly clear

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that team members did not see each other as equally competent with critical comments voiced to me informally and in interviews.

However one worker who had also worked in the long term team felt there was less stress and work in holding cases for a relatively short time:

I spent quite a long time working in the long term team ...the pressures there, they’re totally different to the pressures here. But I’ve spoke about this to my colleagues in this team but if they’ve only ever worked in assessment and duty they don’t see that because they don’t have an understanding of long term work and what that involves. Because you get very bogged down in long term work. Not only do you have all your child protection reviews, looked after children reviews, all the scheduled things that you have as a long term worker you also do deal with all the crisis situations that happen on your caseload on a daily basis. So you still have your child protection medicals, you’re still having to respond to domestic incidents as well as all the court work you have to do and all the court statements you have to write and all the things for adoption and all the adoption procedures...so in my long term job I would spend a lot of my weekends working at home, a lot of evenings, getting up early in the morning and working just to keep on top of the amount of work that I had and to keep the court deadlines and the adoption stuff all ticking over to timescale, whereas here I’ve not had to work at home at all..in a year. (SW6).

Nonetheless, the particular demands of duty were central to the team’s view of itself. It may well have been the case that the long term team too had constructed a strong identity around the different demands of their work.