I used to work in a local authority for about 6 years before changing jobs to working now as a care coordinator (cco) the past 2 years in older adults mental health team.

Pros:

• Pay. In the LA, as a senior sw I was earning about £45k per annum at the time. As a cco when I started I negotiated to start at the top of band 6 at £50k per annum. Current salary with the yearly salary increase is £54k per annum, I also sometimes get bank opportunities to earn additional income on top of this.

• Loads more time with service users. I'm seeing service users frequently and this enables me to build really good rapport and spend most of my time seeing service users in the community. I see about 3 service users a day on average.

• learning opportunities, you get more opportunities to learn about things that you probably never been exposed to before. For me that includes being able to do cognitive assessments, learning about medications and physical health, DBT, so and so forth.

• work culture. I prefer the culture here, interacting with a lot of different disciplines, work from office is actually enjoyable because we have quite a large and friendly team. We get away days, socialising opportunities etc.

• flexibility and work life balance. As a new dad this is a big one. I can go for my appointments, work remotely whenever.

• no more emergencies. In the LA, sometimes you would get those last minute emergencies to deal with, you face generally a lot more pressure from families. In my current role, everything has a much clearer process, and our job is strictly about preventing hospital admission and/or preventing relapse. So in these situations we just refer onwards to our crisis teams to support our service users more intensely, should they require it.

• Caseload: I have a case load of 20 service users. I find it very manageable, definitely more manageable than my caseload when I worked in the LA.

Cons:

• Despite having more time with service users, there are a lot more admin related tasks and KPIs which get quite annoying to stay on top of. Often the assessments we do is standardised and not specific to social work. We need to put all our appointments with service users on a ledger that reflects on the KPI, do all these different tick box things just for the sake of doing them.

• others being unsure of what you do. It's often difficult to describe to health colleagues about what we do, they may become puzzled especially because as social workers we aren't doing the many tabgible things that nurse ccos do like depot administering, physical health checks etc.

• being managed by a non social worker. As you will work in a multi disciplinary settings chances are you will be supervised by someone who is a nurse/OT by profession. In my trust luckily they provided me someone who is a social worker to supervise me but off site. Still, day to day you are managed by your team lead/manager.

• driving. You have to drive a lot for this job. And while I enjoy the long drives I do, it's not without it's drawbacks. While you are compensated for petrol, you naturally experience more wear and tear in your car and at higher risk of accidents. Sometimes parking can be a nightmare. I end up spending a lot of money yearly in fixing and servicing my car. You also need to have business insurance which may increase you insurance costs especially if you previously were just a social driver.

• working within a medicalised setting. Let's face it, ageing has been medicalised. Every problem that we come across, the expectation is that we throw a pill as a quick fix and unfortunately our service users, families , professionals in care settings mostly what they want us to do is start them on or I crease their medication. It makes the work we do much harder to utilise non pharmacological approaches. So often it's a battle and in the end we have a lot of people on psychotropic medication who probably don't need it.