This presentation focuses on staffing supply and service demands in older people social work services in Northern Ireland. A survey collected team level data from 80 social work teams across the five HSC Trusts, and focus groups and interviews with front line social workers provided voice to support the analysis. The findings reveals social workers and managers frequently face overwhelming worker-to-caseload ratios, routine use of waiting lists, and team vacancies. Three key concepts ‘Capacity, Communication and Connection’, a nascent definition of safe staffing in social work and 10 underpinning principles were established based on the voice of the workforce, and these will be adopted into policy and upcoming legislation between 2025-2027.

Professor Paula McFadden is based at Ulster University. Her expertise is on workforce health and wellbeing, focusing on the health and social work/care workforce. She uses mixed methodologies, including standardised instruments and qualitative approaches to provide depth and voice to research participants, and to evidence a range of perspectives / factors associated with burnout, wellbeing, resilience and coping, and she includes individual and organisational factors in the analysis.

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This event is part of Contemporary issues and debates in social work education, research and practice.