PUBLIC health nurses found their social work colleagues "snooty" and hard to get on with, according to new research.
But they also wanted social workers to do the "dirty work" of protecting children from neglect or abuse, the research by Mr Shane Butler, of the Department of Social Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, has suggested.
And they found case conferences - often put forward by health professionals as a vital step in dealing with child care problems - to be a waste of time.
Mr Butler derived his findings, published in Social Science and Medicine, from a discussion with a "focus group" of nurses drawn from three community care areas. Though this method involved small numbers of people, it was commonly used in health and illness research and some would argue that when the discussion in such a group got going people revealed things they would never say in a one to one interview.
In this case, the discussion seems to have been particularly lively, with public health nurses complaining of poor communication with social workers who:
. failed to tell them what was going on (as one nurse put it, "if you do ask them they're kind of snooty enough about it");
. are too slow to respond to what the nurses see as crises;
. are defensive and legally minded ("when you phone them to ask their advice you feel that they are recording things and it will be held in evidence against the parents")
But, as Mr Butler noted, the nurses were very anxious that child protection work should be done by the social workers and not by themselves.
They saw child protection work as something which would destroy their own acceptability with families.
"Now, if I'm associated with taking a child from any family in the area, I feel I have destroyed some of the confidence the people have in me," said one nurse. "I really don't think people would be open with me after that."
The nurses also seem to adopt a less than courageous approach to telling families they are referring them to social workers. Most either don't tell families what they were doing or they lie about it, pretending, for instance, that the social worker was coming in to see if they had enough money.
One nurse said to the social worker: "Don't mention me at all. Go and make your own observation and see what you see or find ... but don't give my name" - an attitude which was hardly likely to improve the standing of public health nurses in the eyes of social workers.
Case conferences about individual children, attended by social workers, nurses, teachers, doctors and other professionals, were commonly put forward as a way to bring a whole range of expertise to bear on individual cases.
Public health nurses, however, saw them as an utter waste of time. All that was achieved, it appears, was the loss of a morning during which those present "blow their own trumpets", as one put it, and the public health nurse was, more often than not, left to get on with dealing with the real situation on her own.
One nurse said: "The social workers were at the end of their tether and someone else was at the end of their tether, but the public health nurse's tether had to go on.