No two jobs in social care are ever the same whether you’re a newly qualified social worker or well established, and the professions themselves can vary massively. In this article, we’ll examine a few of these different roles, in a broad sense, and see what they entail. Hopefully, this will show the range of different roles and skills needed within social care. It’s this mixture of skills and talents that allow social care to be so effective in so many different areas of service users’ lives.
There are five key areas to look at when breaking down social care roles:
Direct care:
This involves directly working with those who need care and support on a daily basis. This could be something such as a care worker, helping people in all aspects of their daily life. Or perhaps a rehabilitation worker, helping those who have had an accident or another incident that has altered their life drastically, and are on the road to recovery.
Management roles:
This is pretty self-explanatory. In this role, you’ll make sure other social care workers are working to the best of their ability, making sure workers are getting the right support themselves. It’s absolutely key that a manager does the latter of these, as this is a very demanding sector. It’s not sustainable for care workers to be stressed or overworked all the time, as it can lead to mistakes and/or people leaving the industry.
Support roles:
This is often similar to direct care. Yet rather than helping in the everyday, they help in specific aspects of a service user’s life. Such as helping with housing support, or help with employment. These roles are needed due to the specialisation of a lot of these areas. While also allowing direct carers to focus on day to day needs of a service user.
Regulated professional roles:
For these types of roles, you have to be registered with a regulated body to practice your profession. This usually means gaining relevant qualifications at an undergraduate degree or diploma level. This is the category that social workers will come under, alongside nurses and counsellors.
Ancillary roles:
These are the roles that have no specific direct care asperts to them, but are vital within the background of social care. For example, cooks and kitchen assistants that work in assisted living facilities, along with housekeepers and cleaners who keep levels of cleanliness and hygiene to a high standard. Outside of these facilities, there’s also roles like drivers and maintenance roles.
