In the previous blog, I described some of the responsibilities of a caseworker. There are many. Caseworkers jobs are not easy. They bear an enormous responsibility and are generally very committed to making sure that the children who depend on them are looked after as well as possible.
Making sure of this is often made quite a challenging task, because of the workload that is put on the caseworker. All across the world, the vast majority of caseworkers are severely overburdened. There are a number of reasons for this. In cases where the caseworkers are working for the government, they tend to be subject to regular budget cuts, meaning that there is not enough money available to hire the number of caseworkers that could reasonably get the job done properly.
In many countries, you see an initial big investment in setting up a social service system and then when it is starting to run well, more and more money is drained from it. This is done without regards for the fact that it was working adequately BECAUSE of the money going into it and that taking the money out will only lead to very high costs in a number of other areas. Because if children do not receive adequate care, outcomes are bad and this tend to mean mental health issues, behavioural issues, health issues and possibly even criminality, all of which come with a cost to society.
In other cases, the reason why caseworkers are overburdened is that people do not realise quite what the job entails and how important it is that it is done properly. When you assign 100 children to one caseworker, you are not just asking her to look over their files once every few weeks. She needs to go visit each of these children once every few weeks, which takes time not just for the visit, but also for travel, and afterwards making notes of the observations and conclusions from the visit. Aside from that she has to be available – for every single one of the children she is responsible for – to be contacted and possibly arrange more visits – whenever there is a problem with the child or the family they are living with. She has to do the assessments of new children, attend meetings where any of the children under her care are discussed. Plus, some of the children are assessed to be at risk, but not so much that they need to be removed from their families, so these children require more frequent visits, to make sure that they are alright and to provide the parents with the support needed to be able to provide a safer environment for their children. Plus the administrative work that comes with each of these duties.
This is a lot. And no one can do this properly for 100 children. Not having enough caseworkers to allow for a reasonable workload – of certainly no more than 30 children – has a lot of serious consequences. To start with, monitoring will be less, because if you have to go visit all the children, then it will be a long time before you make your time back around to the first child. There will be little or no time to respond and act when there are problems, as a result only things that appear to be life-and-death situations are really responded too, which in turn means that smaller problems are allowed to get bigger and bigger until they turn into life-and-death situations. This would not have been necessary with a reasonable workload, but when someone is severely overburdened, it becomes inevitable.
It also means that there is less time for assessment of both children and families, which in turn means that the decisions made are not always in the best interest of the child, because the information gathered was not complete. And finally when a person is so severely overburdened, while still trying their utmost to do whatever they can for the children they are responsible for, they are going to end up running themselves into the ground until they are unable to keep working anymore. Their physical and mental health will get worse and worse until working any longer becomes impossible.
The result of caseworkers burning out, is that children are appointed new caseworkers, again and again. This will have the effects described in the previous blog, the same as when there would not be a designated caseworker for a child. This in turn leads to worse care-decisions. And so, the vicious cycle spins downwards.
Investment in enough caseworkers to allow for a caseload that is properly manageable is essential in having any properly functioning alternative care system. It forms the backbone that holds the whole system up. And if the investment is not made, the backbone will crumble and the system will collapse, with detrimental effects to the children and families who rely on the system.
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