If you’re a social worker, can I ask how much work you complete outside of 9-5 hours?

[DowntownBayou]

Am I right in thinking this has got to be one of the worst jobs for unreasonable deadlines?

I quit due to stress. I was contracted to do 21 hours a week. On my days off I would do 2-3 hours while my baby napped and usually 1-2 hours mist evenings. Extra at weekends if I was really snowed under. So I would say around 12 - 15 hours unpaid. I basically spent my working hours doing visits, meetings, training, on call. And then wrote reports, did emails at home.
Technically I might have been better going full time except my caseload would have been double so i would have been working probably nearly 60 hours a week. My line manager use to say when I raised it in supervision “how can i support you to manage your time more effectively?”

It was for me. Most evenings I would be writing up notes from home visits etc, partly because of the famous ‘if it’s not documented on the system it didn’t happen’, but also so my notes would be contemporaneous, thorough, and accessible in case I was unexpectedly off work.

If reports need writing, eg for ICPC or Court, they don’t wait, they have to be produced, and the rest of your work doesn’t get done by someone else in the meantime. At its worst/most demanding, I had a caseload of 43. That was 43 high risk cases, where I would wake up in the night desperately hoping I had done enough to keep xxx safe, so yes, EVERYTHING had to be documented and very often involved writing up after hours.

Yes, worst jobs for unreasonable expectations. I used to routinely work about 50-60 hours a week but have stopped that.

I manage social workers now and workload is a major issues.

Ex social worker. I've been out of it 10 years now and by coincidence dreamed last night that I was back at work, arguing with managers about priorities, work load, working hours. I haven't dreamt of work in years. Whenever this came up for real, I would ask my manager to prioritise the work if I was getting it wrong. They never did.

Not a social worker, but work closely with them. I think it depends on the type of work you do. The adult social care and disabilities team SWs I work with don’t seem so stressed and seem to clock off at a reasonable time and be quite boundaried.

Child protection and adolescents teams seem completely frazzled, always working late, replying to emails at silly times of the night…and a high turnover of staff.