‘I’ll wake up at 4am thinking is that child safe?’ Belfast social workers strike over ‘extreme staffing pressures’

SOCIAL workers blocked the Shankill Road on Wednesday in protest against “extreme staffing pressures” leaving vulnerable children at risk.

Briefly holding up traffic outside a health centre, it was the first of three strike days this week from Nipsa trade union members in the Belfast Trust area – with more in other trusts to follow in the coming weeks.

Gillian Wilson, a social worker in west Belfast, said her team has two members when it needs six – often causing her sleepless nights.

“None of my colleagues are happy to be doing this, we know that families are missing out because we’re here today,” she told The Irish News.

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“There’s extreme staffing pressures, we need change.

“There’s a risk that families will go into crisis, maybe there’s domestic or physical abuse going on.

“That’s left so long that a child gets hurt or worse which we don’t want to happen.

“It’s extremely stressful. My colleagues and I will wake up at 4am thinking ‘I haven’t had time to do that, is that child safe this weekend?’”

NIPSA President Tanya Killen said there was “anger and frustration” in the Belfast branch.

“There’s one team that has two people when it needs ten. One of them has less than a year’s experience,” she said.

“To say that service is decimated is an understatement. It’s emotionally exhausting for them because they’re not able to provide the services they’re being paid to do.

“Ultimately, the concern of our members are that children’s lives are at risk, that a child will lose their life because of a failure of services.”

Clare Joudeh has been a social worker in Belfast for 35 years, now a principal social worker for looked after children.

“Never in my career have I had the experience we’re going through at the moment in terms of the increasing numbers of children needing social services and coming into care, running alongside an ever-decreasing number of staff.

“The difficulty is that we have some children we don’t have our eyes on as much as we want, we haven’t got the staff to do the visiting.

“Unfortunately, we can’t always keep everyone safe. We’re not the people harming children, we’re the people trying to protect them. But we need people to help us.”

Social worker and Nipsa representative Damien Maguire said: “If something goes wrong with the care of a child, the public are outraged and want to know what the social worker was doing.

“The public are right to ask those questions, but we can’t continue to bury our heads in the sand when referrals to children’s social services have rocketed in the last few years and there’s a significant rise in the number of children coming into care – trying to manage that with a depleted workforce.”

People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll criticised the Executive for spending too much on agency workers instead of investing in staffing.

“Really the consequences of that decision is that we’ll see more vulnerable people, an increase in people with addictions and looked after children,” he said.

A Belfast Trust spokesperson paid tribute to the “professionalism, commitment, care and dedication of our social workers working with children and families”.

“Northern Ireland has a shortage of social workers which results in a high level of vacancies and this has had a particular impact on the delivery of children’s services,” they said.

“We remain fully engaged in working with regional colleagues in the Department of Health’s development of the safe staffing guidance.

“We are working closely with our trade union colleagues to try and ensure that critical services are maintained in order to provide emergency cover for children and families during this period of industrial action.”