Code of Practice 2 : As a social care worker, you must strive to establish and maintain the trust and confidence of service users and carers.

The second code means:

1. being honest and trustworthy;
2. communicating in an appropriate, open, accurate and straight forward way;
3. respecting confidential information and clearly explaining agency policies and confidentiality to service users and carers;
4. being reliable and dependable;
5. honouring work commitments, agreements and arrangements and when it is not possible to do so, explaining why to service users and carers;
6. declaring issues that might create conflicts of interest and making sure that they do not influence your judgement or practice; and,
7. adhering to policies and procedures about accepting gifts and money from service users and carers

　

Here's a case study that illustrates how important these principles can be in practice:

　

Mr Phillips is 24 and attends a work opportunities scheme for people with a learning disability. The work helps Mr Phillips to learn new skills and to use them to do his job.

He works as part of a team and has made new friends, he enjoys the camaraderie of the work environment and during the days he works the team rely on him to perform specific tasks.

His main carer is his mother and on the days he's at his work placement his mum makes arrangements to engage in activities she can't usually commit to because of her caring responsibilities.

On three occasions in the last month, Mr Phillips’ support worker has failed to arrive on time to take him to his work placement at a local supermarket. This meant that. Mr Phillips was disappointed and he felt he had left his colleagues down.  Also his mother had to cancel the arrangements that she had made.

　

Do you think that the carer may have breached some of these codes?

In your experience, do things like this happen often? If you had been Mr Phillip’s social care worker and you knew that you were going to be late picking him for his work placement – how would you deal with the situation?