Communitycare.co.uk recently reported a survey which showed that four out of ten social workers regard their caseload as 'unmanageable'. This is, of course, an unacceptable situation, as unmanageable caseloads add up to stress, poor-quality practice, a higher level of mistakes, increased sickness absence, a failure to learn and very poor morale. Some people would see this as a management challenge: what are managers going to do to address these problems? This is a legitimate question, but I would want to present the situation in broader terms as a professional challenge: what are we, as professionals - whether practitioners, managers, educators or whatever - going to do about it? Of course, there aren't any magic answers to this complex problem, but all the more reason, then, for people to support one another in finding ways forward, rather than just staying quiet and hoping that 'they' will sort it out eventually. Bureaucrats say 'they'; professionals say 'we'.

In an earlier posting (http://www.socialworkfocus.com/myblog-admin/trying-to-do-the-impossible.html) I warned of the dangers of trying to do the impossible. This survey shows that this is an issue we need to take very seriously.