The dictionary definition of ‘purpose’ is “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists”. [1]

If we want to change our practice, and escape the confines of our current bureaucracies, we need to start by changing the way we define and describe our purpose.

Our reason for doing the work that we do.

Our ‘why’.

The very first line in the Care Act statutory guidance – point 1.1 – states that “the core purpose of adult care and support is to help people to achieve the outcomes that matter to them in their life.” [2] This prominent statement about the purpose of adult social care should steer and shape our practice. But this explicit message seems to have been lost in translation, and as such the purpose of our roles is determined by the lens we use to view the purpose of social care, and to view the people we support and serve.

When we see people as vulnerable, weak, and needy, and social care as a safety net, our purpose is maintenance. We adopt the classic medical model approach of treating and fixing, and the classic charity model approach of rescuing and looking after and caring for. ‘Doing to’.

When we view people as customers, and social care in terms of ‘service delivery’, our default response is to ‘do for’. Our purpose is to assess for and commission and broker services to be supplied to passive recipients. ‘Providers’ and ‘service users’.

And when we think about people as ‘demand’, and see social care in terms of finite services, our purpose becomes to ration. To screen and redirect.

Processes dominate our practice to such an extent that as well as describing what we do we do (screen, triage, assess, review), they have also become our ‘why’.

Our purpose has become the enactment of our processes.

Job adverts refer to social workers being responsible for “reviewing waiting lists for prioritisation and screening”, “screening and risk assessing cases”, “assessing service users” and “reviewing placements”. We have ‘assessment officers’ and ‘review teams’. Our ‘performance’ is measured in terms of the number of assessments and reviews we complete, and the number of ‘cases’ we close.

Through all the lenses I mentioned above, the people we serve are ‘a problem’.

And through all these lenses, the solution to the problem is a service.

So ultimately the purpose of social workers has become to assess people for services.

To gatekeep and to judge and to prescribe.

A second definition of ‘purpose’ is “a person’s sense of resolve or determination.” [3]

Our ‘sense of purpose’.

In serving this institutional machine, our own sense of purpose has been crushed.

Lost.

Instead of embracing our values and our passion and our initiative, our current system sucks us in to its structures and processes and hierarchies and rules and spits out robots reliant on forms and procedures to complete tasks and achieve targets.

Our bureaucracies have dehumanised us, and in turn we have dehumanised the people we serve.

We’ve forgotten that we all need a strong sense of purpose and meaning to live well. A need to feel useful. Necessary. Needed.

“… and Marvellous was suddenly wrenched out of old age like a seed potato wrenched out of the familiar comfort of dark. She had little time to think about Death, pushed aside as it were, by activity, youth and noise. Things were required of her again and this time by people and not by dreams. And Marvellous blossomed, having quite forgotten what an exciting and necessary jolt being needed gave.”

Sarah Winman [4]

Our processes serve our institutional purpose, but usually ignore the purpose of the people we’re employed to support. We focus on the help people need to get up and to get dressed, but not their reason to get out of bed.

Social care has become a destination (‘getting care’, ‘going into care’, ‘placed in care’), not a vehicle to support people to be who they want to be, and to do the things that matter most to them.

However, if we reimagine the purpose of social care, and indeed public services more generally, we can liberate both the ‘assessors’ and the ‘assessed’ from these bureaucratic and dehumanising confines.

If we see social care in terms of supporting people to live good lives – gloriously ordinary lives – our purpose becomes to understand what that good life looks like to the person we’re with, and to work alongside them to achieve that.

If we see people as human beings with gifts and potential, our purpose becomes supporting people to find, or retain, or regain their own sense of purpose. Supporting people to flourish and to thrive.

And in turn, what matters to them becomes what matters to us.

And we remember that our purpose is people, not process.

“Yesterday I decorated my Christmas tree and baked my Christmas cake. So what? you may well say. But I could only do that because of support from my Personal Assistant (PA), who I employ using a direct payment, as being disabled I need assistance to live my life the way I want to. That is social care. Yes, I need and want care to be fed and clean, but only so that I can live my life, otherwise what’s the point?”

Anna Severwright [5]

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References

[1] Purpose. Oxford Languages. Google.

[2] Care and support statutory guidance. Department of Health and Social Care. Updated 5 October 2023.

[3] Purpose. Oxford Languages. Google.

[4] A year of marvellous ways, Sarah Winman, Headline, 2017

[5] Social care is a tool, not a destination, Anna Severwright, NHS Confederation, 10 December 2020.