She has no professional track record as a Social Worker and placing a journalist in such a prominent position damages the integrity of Social Work.

(of a bad or harmful act) intentional; deliberate.
“wilful acts of damage”

synonyms: deliberate, intentional, intended, done on purpose, premeditated, planned, calculated, purposeful, conscious, knowing; More

Wilful also implies doing without due consideration to the outcome or consequences.

So if there is going to be a piece of legislation drafted to scapegoat individuals wilful neglect will have to consider a different derivation.

As I’m sure many social workers may be accused of being neglectful with the benefit of hindsight focusing on their actions that led up to the outcome which is now being scrutinised, I’m sure that they would not have chosen that course of action based on the information that they were working with until things went wrong.

After all, all of us would win the lottery on Sunday morning after knowing what the numbers were on the Saturday night, can we sue , take the lottery companies to court wilful neglect of failing to provide us with our dreams which they so readily promote, or would it be argued given the information, and our mental capacity, in conjunction with the odds, these moneymaking services cannot be held accountable as to why we didn’t win.

Though I can accept there is a need to evaluate the situation, scrutinise what led up to the negative outcome, all these situations have been looked at in the past and individuals clearly state lessons learnt, so why this must not happen again, it is clear that there are too many variables which means predicting the outcome will be virtually impossible in some situations, until the outcome has happened.

As highlighted in the text above this potential piece of legislation will possibly cause more people to inherit more work, done by less individuals, which in itself will make the likelihood of something going wrong more likely to happen, which in itself will justify why wilful neglect needs to happen is piece of legislation. But it won’t stop the situation in itself, it will only justify accountability, promote a bigger blame culture, and sell newspapers, who are only interested in promoting a story to sell their own existence.

If social workers are afraid of unjust punishment when things go wrong, then not surprisingly it will be hard for them to be open and honest when mistakes are made. That means that valuable learning from error will be lost and services become increasingly less safe.

In civil aviation and some other safety critical industries this lesson has already been learned. The emphasis there is on building a just reporting culture, not a culture of blame.

That’s what we need in social work; a recognition that safer services will only come about when people feel free to talk openly and honestly about what goes wrong and explore ways of improving services to reduce the likelihood of future disasters.