Birmingham Ex-Social Worker Struck Off For “Inappropriate” Examinations On Children

A FORMER Birmingham social worker in charge of a childrens home has been struck off the professional register for abusing his power and carrying out inappropriate intimate examinations on vulnerable children.

Wladyslaw Piotr Kiczma was involved in various cases in the 1970s and 80s when he inspected children intimately with no professional justification to do so, the General Social Care Council was told. Kicsma, now a retired 65-year-old, did not attend the hearing to accept or deny charges when the case was found against him and he was banned from working in social care.

A panel was told that, as a qualified nurse and officer in charge of Stuarts Road Childrens Home, Bordesley, between 1973 and 1983, Kiczma was responsible for conducting examinations on new arrivals, mainly for scabies and lice.

But people who were once under his care had since come forward complaining that the social worker ordered them to strip with many examinations being very intimate, it was told.

The panel accepted the councils submission that examinations were outside the remit of a social worker and that Kiczma had failed to respect and maintain the dignity of a child and abused the trust placed in him.

Evidence included a woman who had been at the home in the early 1980s who described having to remove all her clothing for an examination with him, which was sparked after she had refused to eat a meal of eggs.

Kiczma was also found to have physically examined a child at a home visit in 1986, during which he asked the boy to take off his clothes and then touched him inappropriately.

The panel was also told that in 2005, whilst seconded as a social worker for Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust, Kiczma asked a community psychiatric nurse to give NHS patients a card which advertised his private counselling business, which was in breach of his employment code.

Elizabeth Hutchinson, spokeswoman for the GSCC, said: The committee felt no reasonable social worker would have behaved in this way and that he failed to respect and maintain the dignity of the child and abused the trust placed in him.

The committee decided that all of the allegations amounted to misconduct and breached a number of areas of the Code of Practice for Social Care Workers, which social workers sign up to when they register with GSCC.

In defence of the actions, the hearing was told there had been an absence of guidelines and lack of support for Kiczma in the 1970s and 80s and standards at that time of the allegations were less rigorous in terms of childrens rights and boundary issues than today.

Mike Wardle, chief executive of the GSCC, said: As the regulator of social workers, we are able to highlight misconduct and take those who commit it to account, removing them from the profession altogether if we feel they are not suitable to work in social care.

Fortunately, such cases are rare and the majority of social workers go about their work with integrity, compassion and professionalism.