Report of the Committee on Social Workers in the Mental Health Services.
- Great Britain. Committee on Social Workers in the Mental Health Service.
- Date:
- [1951]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Report of the Committee on Social Workers in the Mental Health Services. Source: Wellcome Collection.
24/58 (page 24)
![patient. In its first four years it accepted 14,500 patients and at the time of study had a total case load of 6,639 patients all over the country, 15 psychiatric social workers, 37 assistants, and 20 regional offices: 57 per cent. of its patients had come from civilian sources and agencies. Its work can be taken as a fair guide to the likely experience of a local authority undertaking comprehensive community care, except that the organisation of the national scheme was neces- sarily less compact. To balance this dispersal, however, there was an exceptionally good provision of means of transport and secretarial help for the workers. Each social worker in a well-populated district gave on the average about 80 items of service per month (visit, inter- view or protracted negotiation) and took about 260 cases in a year, including closure of cases. A maximum desirable current active case load was considered to be 80 per worker. In sparsely populated districts with much travel all these figures suffered reduction by as much as half according to the distances involved. 66. A variety of figures have also been presented to us in relation to the case loads of persons engaged in other types of social work. We have examined these figures closely with a view to suggesting an active case load for social workers in the mental health services but we feel that the variations are so great as to make comparisons unsatisfactory and we are therefore reluctant to draw any definite conclusions from them. OTHER SOCIAL WORKERS IN THE MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES ESTIMATED DEMAND 67. It is common knowledge that the supply of mental welfare workers, particularly of trained workers, is in many areas inadequate to meet existing demands and it seems that the tendency will be for the gap to widen, unless recruitment can be stimulated. One result of this is that some employing authorities, as we have indicated, advertise for unqualified workers at a salary which is more favourable at the minimum of the scale than for the qualified psychiatric social worker. 68. The duties of local health authorities with regard to the ascertainment, supervision, etc., of mental defectives in the community are already consider- able, and the National Health Service Act attached a new importance to the responsibilities of these authorities in providing care and after-care for persons suffering from mental illness and from mental defectiveness. The scope of this work has not been rigidly defined and this adds to, rather than detracts from, its potentialities. But the fact that the work overlaps that performed through the hospitals and clinics makes it difficult to assess the provision to be made by loca] health authorities. 69. The number of workers employed and their training and experience vary considerably from one authority to another. One large authority anticipates an eventual need, apart from psychiatric social workers, of two mental welfare workers per 100,000 of the population, while the approved proposals of another authority with a population of 121,000 provide for the appointment of three mental welfare workers. If the former estimate is taken to include duly authorised officers—a reasonable assumption, since all workers in the authority’s mental health services are so authorised—we believe that for a growing and important service of this kind this may be an underestimate. Several authorities believe a figure of one mental welfare worker per 100,000 of the population to be the correct establishment for mental deficiency work alone; and it may be argued that for the performance of all mental welfare work in an area there](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32178840_0024.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
