A social worker who was in charge of a Birmingham children’s home in the seventies and eighties has been removed from the Social Care Register after being found to have carried out inappropriate physical examinations of children during his time there.
An independent panel of the General Social Care Council (GSCC) heard that Wladyslaw Piotr Kiczma, 65, was the Officer in Charge of Stuart’s Road Children’s Home between 1973 and 1983. As a qualified nurse, he was responsible for conducting Free From Infection (FFI) examinations on children admitted to the home, primarily to identify scabies and lice. However, the Committee heard that in various cases between 1974 and 1983 he inspected children’s genitals despite there being no professional justification for doing so.
On this matter the panel heard evidence from a previous investigation into Kiczma’s conduct following a complaint from a child. They also heard from a woman who had been at the home in the early eighties 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 in his role as a field social worker in 1986 to have physically examined a child at a home visit, during which he asked the boy to take off his clothes and then touched his genitals. The Committee said 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.
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. This was a breach of his employment code. Kiczma also provided a private counselling service to a service user he had met through his work.
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. Kiczma did not attend the hearing but written submissions from him were considered by the Committee.
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.”
Social workers have a right of appeal to the independent Care Standards Tribunal.