Reminiscences of an out-of-hours social worker #1: Angela

 

While I was a social worker by day, between 1983 and 1997 I also worked one or two shifts a week on the out-of-hours standby duty team. This team, consisting mainly of daytime social workers, dealt exclusively with emergencies and crises that arose outside normal working hours. We covered nights, weekends, and Bank Holidays.

Out of hours, two social workers covered the entire county. It was a large geographical area of over 2,000 square miles, and it could entail a journey of 40 or 50 miles to reach the far ends.

 In the early years, the only means of contacting us was via a pager. If your pager went off, you had to contact a deputising service which then told you what the problem was.

 For several years, the only way of contacting the deputising service if you were out on a call was using a public phone box. You got to know the locations of all the phone boxes in the county, and always had to make sure that you had a pocket full of change.

 We dealt with everything. This covered all the service user groups: children and families, young offenders, older people and people with physical disabilities, as well as people with mental health problems and learning disability. We dealt with anything from child protection referrals, to assessments under the Mental Health Act, and obtaining night sitters or emergency residential care for elderly people.

 For some reason, teenage girls often seemed to present the most intractable problems. I’ll tell you about Angela.