Transcript Slide 1

Making records count
Or why do we record all this stuff
anyway – we want to work with
children
Not a new issue
• ‘apparently unpopular, time consuming
practice of social work case recording…’
• Records… can be variously described as
ephemeral, incomplete, exaggerated,
controlling, therapeutic, injurious, protective,
important, obligatory, useful…ie what it
actually is is in the eye of the beholder”.
• Prince, 1996
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Poor records = poor practice
• “It is not too much to say that a case work
agency that keeps poor records is giving
ineffective or superficial treatment to clients”
• (Sheffield, 1920)
The links between poor recording and poor
outcomes have been made for nearly 100
years which is not much longer than our
profession has been around.
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Discussion as old as time.
• between Beatrice Webb and Octavia Hill,
1886, about recording in social care:
• Beatrice – wisdom of writing down
“observations so as to be able to give true
information”
• Octavia – “what you want is action”
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A social work view
“Recording is..pointless but essential”
This statement highlights the tension between
the different strands of social work activity:
1. Casework/therapy
2. Service delivery
3. Social control
(Kinnibrugh, 1984
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So what do we mean by recording?
• We mean all the written material contained in the case work files of
people using Children Services. These files may be wholly or partly
electronic or they may be in hard copy.
• Recording is a crucial part of day to day practice and takes up a substantial
amount of practitioners' time. Recording involves:
• writing down the work you do;
• noting the progress people make towards their desired outcomes;
• including the views of the person;
• analysis and assessment; and
• the life history of the person and its interpretation.
• Good records are an essential tool for practitioners to reflect on their on
going work with people and plan future work. When shared with the
person whose file it is they encourage transparency.
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What is the purpose of social work
recording?
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documenting the involvement with the individual;
informing assessment and care planning;
enabling practitioners to review and reflect on their work;
assisting practitioners to identify any patterns;
ensuring accountability of staff;
meeting statutory requirements;
providing evidence for legal proceedings;
enabling continuity when a new worker takes over the case;
providing performance information;
forming a biography - for example, for a looked after child to read at a later date to
provide them with their history;
providing evidence for inquiries or reviews; and
assisting partnership working between workers and people using their services.
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Good recording should:
• be drawn up in partnership with the person whose record it is;
• record the views of the person whose record it is, including whether they
have given permission to share information;
• be an accurate up to date record of work, which is regularly reviewed and
summarised;
• include a record of decisions taken and the reasons for these decisions;
• include a chronology of significant events;
• be evidence based and ethical;
• separate fact from opinion;
• incorporate assessment, including risk assessment where appropriate;
• include an up to date support/care/action plan; and
• record race/ethnicity, gender, religion, language, disability.
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What kind of records do we
generate?
memos
Minutes
Emails
Texts
Letters
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Case notes
Chronologies
Reports
Care plans
Action plans
Support plans
Review reports
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Professional writing is underpinned by
professional knowledge which has three
components:•
conceptual knowledge based on theory which informs a practitioner’s
understanding and thinking about a service user and their circumstances
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instrumental knowledge based on research and evidenced based practice
which enables a practitioner to be proactive in deciding how to support
people
• tacit knowledge based on practice wisdom and personal and professional
experiences to influence engagement with a service user
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The tools we have
• We have pen and paper
• We have computers –both office and mobile
• We have dictaphones, cameras, videos, mobile
phones
• We have places and spaces to record in that we
never dreamt of in our youth – facebook, twitter,
reality television, google earth, street cams
• We are recorded everyday in a myriad of ways
and our information is stored
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The ways we perceive information
• Visual information = only what we see
without any written words or numbers
• Aural information = only sounds
• Written information = contained in words and
numbers only
• Olfactory = what we can smell or taste
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What information matters most
How much of what we take in when we are
doing case work do we record. How good are
we at pinpointing what senses have been
informing our judgements about our
information?
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Non verbal communication
• Nonverbal communication ranges from facial
expression to body language. Gestures, signs,
and use of space are also important in
nonverbal communication. Multicultural
differences in body language, facial
expression, use of space, and especially,
gestures, are enormous and enormously open
to misinterpretation.
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Say it with feeling…
• According to A. Barbour, author of Louder Than Words:
Nonverbal Communication, the total impact of a message
breaks down like this:
• 7 percent verbal (words)
• 38 percent vocal (volume, pitch, rhythm, etc)
• 55 percent body movements (mostly facial expressions)
This research relates to communication that contains strong
emotions, or taboo subjects.
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Listening affects recording
• The literal listener – concentrates on the exact
words that people use and will often be able to
quote verbatim; they are concerned with detail, are
very precise, direct and up front with people, and
expect people to be up front with them. The literal
listener does not like vagueness, ambiguity or
confusion, and, if there is ever a disagreement over
what is supposed to have been said, will say “But you
said”
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Listening styles
• The emotional listener –is less concerned
with the exact words that people use, but is
far more concerned with how someone
appears to be feeling. The emotional listener
will note tone of voice, facial expression, body
language and any discontinuity between the
verbal, and non-verbal, communication.
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Listening Styles
• The meaning listener – works from almost the
opposite premises of the literal listener and believes
that the most important part of any message is not
what is being said, but the hidden messages or
agendas. Meaning listeners assume that people
rarely day what they really mean, and that it is
important to look beyond the words, to work out
what lies behind the message.
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The power of the person
“each individual can assume that the sense they
make of the world, the meaning they give to
their experiences, is somehow an objective
fact, and that people do not always
sufficiently realise how the same world can be
looked at in very different ways”
(Liz O’Rourke, For the Record, 2002)
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Hearing and recording the voice of
the child
• It can be hard to hear the voice of the child, to
feel their perspective is reflected in the
written record.
• Children tend to disappear from the record as
the processes take over.
• The challenge is to make recording the child’s
voice authentic
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Fixated on writing it down
• So what exactly are we trying to do when we
make a record – usually written, usually on a
form, usually following a process, and usually
on a computer.
• SENSE MAKING
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Critical thinking
• To know what to record we have to know
what is important.
• This involves being able to think critically.
• TBU = information that may be factually
accurate but does not take the situation
forward or enhance understanding or decision
making in anyway.
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Analysis in social work
• Analysis, i.e. the ability to break down the different elements within the
family
• situation and the wider community, in order to understand the
relationship between
• the various factors that are impacting on the child, the weight to give to
each factor
• and how they might be changed or influenced. Using information
intelligently and
• constructing a narrative and hypotheses which can be tested and re-tested
are a
• daily part of the competent social worker’s task.
(Taken from the Munro review report, 2010, written by the London Assistant
Directors, in Appendix 3)
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Puzzles and problems
• A puzzle is something that has an answer – even
if it is very complex to work out. Once this is
worked out then the results can be predicted.
This is the premises of the television show
numbers. People can be programmed and
predicted.
• Procedures and computers work on the idea that
there is a complex puzzle with an eventual right
and wrong answer
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A problem
• A problem is something that does not have
one answer – just a number of possible
solutions with outcomes that have limited
predictability.
• It pushes a group to use emergent practice to
manage it – in other words you do something,
see what happens and then make a another
decision based on those outcomes.
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RESPONSI VE PRACTICE
• The difficulty in working in this way is that you
can be reactive instead of responsive.
• Procedures and policy and IT exist to support
responsive practice – that is too limit the number
of variables by ensuring that patterns particularly
those of past behaviour, and evidence gathered
from static situations (usually serious case
reviews) are used to contain and guide
interventions.
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IT as part of the solution
• Social workers are not against IT….although you could be
forgiven for believing that they are.
• The perception that ICS is responsible for a legislatively
based framework that dictates certain information be
recorded at certain times is mis-informed.
• Each Local Authority is compelled to discharge their duties
under a legislative framework
• The ICS mimics this framework – some more clumsily than
others.
• IT is iterative NOT static –both invention and investment
must be on-going
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Advantages of electronic recording
• you can find information more easily when there is a crisis;
• no need to interpret illegible, handwritten case notes;
• much easier for you to immediately insert information - even
if you are not the allocated worker;
• managers at all levels in the organisation are able to access
individual case records relatively easily;
• ease of access for out of hour's staff and other agencies;
• enables information to be gathered about unmet need; and
• easier to set up performance information systems which allow
aggregating of information from individual files.
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The shape we are in
• A lot of focus on social work – its role and
purpose
• A lot of focus on the difficulty of the role of
the social worker – the lack of resources and
support, the unreasonable demands of the
recording system
• BUT is this where the focus needs to be?
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Building child shaped futures
• Agree on the purpose of our recording
• Agree on the information we need to collect to carry
out our purpose
• Agree on the ways we are going to use the information
• Build something that helps us manage that information
• Use the information to respond to the child and family
in the ways we agreed
• Record the information using all our professional skills
to inform the work – and make it count.
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Our records and report need to support
understanding and decision making in why
and how we intervene in the lives of children
and their families
Report writing needs to be seen as a highly
valued task that demonstrates the quality of
the professional behind the pen.
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Making recording part of delivery
• Above all a focus on children that is about
DOING – recording in a thoughtful and
systemic way, using the information that we
gather, the growing body of knowledge in our
field – to intervene in a focused and
meaningful way with children and families in
our communities
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