Smile

I'm a socialist, but as I get older I get extremes that are anything but socialist. I suppose these are the times when we think we're becoming our parents.

When I changed careers from one that involved nothing buit paperwork to one that required very little it was the secondary part of this new career that probably made it as rosy as it seemed. The support services and voluntary sectors had, over the last 15 years, become less bureaucratical and focused specifically on helping individuals, but because of the lack of recording it was easy for the slackers to slack and this meant there were people in jobs that were either not doing their job or couldn't prove they were doing it. So with the arrival of a new Labour idea - Supporting People - the entire sector was overhauled, new reporting systems and policies and procedures were brought in, many of them good and safeguards against abusing the system, but the majority left dedicated workers with their heads in their hands. We had gone from one extreme to another, where there was recording, vital notes made for the benefit of staff not present all the time, etc., now we have a situation where everything needs to be recorded almost in quadruplet, plus some of this repeated work has to be repeated in a different format somewhere else. In fact there is so much paperwork now that instead of 90% of our time being dedicated to our clients, we're having to cancel meetings with clients because the paperwork has become a priority.

My latest job was no different and what made that worse was that because of my loftier position I had to do even more paperwork, I had to justify everything I did, even if it was just part of my job description. Everything needs logging, almost to the degree if you have to go to the loo for more than a couple of minutes, OK maybe not that bad but it feels that bad sometimes.

The thing is I am praised for the good work I do, yet criticised almost in the same sentence for not doing the correct, or any, reporting. I know I could find the time or I could organise things to allow me the time, but I also know that the nature of the work doesn't really allow you to book 'periods of time' because the demands of the client are not based on a diary or a clock.

I'm moving jobs next week, the new one has two hours a week set aside for paperwork, all over paperwork is handled by a admin assistant (how good and clever is that?). The problem is with the voluntary sector is, why employ an admin person when you can get the support worker to do it all? Proving to me that the people running the voluntary sectors now don't understand it.