Young night drifters’ social workers – health at risk?

Abstract

As the social change takes place in Hong Kong cosmopolitan, life pattern of people changes accordingly. 24-hour work leads to people shift their duty in 4 sessions and it direct affects the ecology of family that children and parents’ time of encountering becomes scare due to different life pattern. In the past decades, the phenomenon emerged that a lot of youth hanged around in street deep at night. As such, some surveys had been launched by 2 NGOs to understand such youth’s activities and social service intervention was eventually tailored for this group of youth. It was found that around 40,000 youth constantly stayed in street over the mid-night and their activities were, mainly, hanging around, wine drinking and fouling around, and chatting to each other. As their activities provoked residents’ discontent as they were disturbance that they felt annoyed with commotion in the middle of the night, the seriousness of youth night drifters issues was reflected by local indigenous leaders’ complaints. In 2001, 18 teams of youth night drifting services were set up in Integrated Youth Centre throughout the territory under the support of the Hong Kong SAR Government. In terms of manpower, each team consisted 1 social worker In-charge and 2 social work assistants with the support of 1 vehicle for initiating the services. Under the review of 2005, the manpower of the teams was increased to not more than 5 but the geographical areas served was said to be extensive. Working with youth night drifters, workers majority work from 10PM to 6PM and their work has to cover large geographical area of a region. Workers had to continually work for 24 hours in order to fulfill the basis requirement of 44 hours work in terms of 11 sessions work a week. According to the workers, they were exhausted and found their health weaker than before and that had led to the high turnover rate due to the overnight work. Therefore, this paper is to explore workers’ health and mental conditions in their youth night drifters work. The relationship between the turnover rate and their exhaustion in youth night drifting work will also be studied as well. Besides, ways of improving their working conditions in order to protect their health and reduce the high turnover rate will be explored at the end of the paper.