‘I didn’t become a social worker to feed reports into computers’

With practitioners needing less paperwork and more direct work, is it time to embrace new ways of recording, asks Social Work Tutor:

With voice-to-text software, digital dictaphones and cloud-server software, it seems archaic that in 2016 we still rely on text-based reports being manually fed into outdated computer systems to form the bulk of our work-based evidence.

If I may be so bold as to propose a truly progressive approach to social work practice, drawing upon the new desire for innovation, I would propose that the government look to buy out councils from long-term deals where people with poor IT skills have been wooed into buying in outdated IT recording systems.

In their place I would wish to see new systems that seek to use video, audio and picture recording to tell the story of the lives of the children we work for.

Read the full piece at source: ‘I didn’t become a social worker to feed reports into computers’