is unusual but there is a sense in which it comes together in her current work. She fi nds her academic discipline has been helpful: ‘With the PhD you had to look at strategic patterns because history is about patterns and individuals. You need an obsession with detail and you have to be curious. They are transferable attributes that I use on a daily basis.’
Her curiosity has led her to set out the three
areas where she thinks there is a business case to be made for adult social work: safeguarding; working with vulnerable people with complex needs; and community social work. The complexity of situations in
safeguarding needs a workforce with assertive and competent assessment and evaluation skills, she says. Professionals need to be able to balance investigations with personalisation, risk-enabling and protection so that people are not wrapped in cotton wool.
There needs to be evidence that, having invested in highly paid and
well-trained staff, they deliver something that adds value and warrants the investment
‘Evidence to date shows that the majority
of safeguarding investigations end up in more care or monitoring,’ says Adi. ‘That doesn’t tell me that we are empowering people to take risks.’ After an investigation social workers should
traces her need for evidence back to her fi rst career as an academic. On the surface, her PhD in South Asian studies has little to do with social work. But her study of a peasant revolt in Bengal in the 1940s resonates with social work with its story of a marginalised, oppressed group taking control of their lives. From academia she spent 10 years as a health worker in general practice before training as a social worker and quickly moved up the management ladder. Her career history
have the skills to support people who are vulnerable to take risks and manage their own lives, she says. But she recognises that this is not always the case and questions the quality of training. To this end, she has sent all frontline staff on an adult safeguarding post- qualifying course. She has also started to have all staff , including herself, trained in attachment-based adult social work to help them understand interpersonal dynamics when working with vulnerable people with complex needs – part two of her business case. This turns the care management model with its “sausage machine approach” to assessments, as she puts it, on its head.