We were delighted to welcome Professor Ron Paterson (Ngāti Raukawa and Scottish whakapapa) to the SWRB office recently for a conversation about regulatory practice and what good regulation looks like in action.
Professor Paterson brings a remarkable depth of experience to these questions. As a former Health and Disability Commissioner, the author of The Good Doctor: What Patients Want, the independent reviewer of the Law Society’s regulatory practice, and a current lay member of the Medical Council, he has spent much of his career thinking carefully about what it means to regulate well – and what happens when regulation falls short.
The purpose of occupational regulation
At the heart of Professor Paterson’s thinking is a deceptively simple idea: the primary purpose of occupational regulation is public protection. Not the protection or promotion of the profession – that is the work of professional associations – but the assurance that the public can have confidence in the practitioners they encounter.
This is something that regulated professions and their employers can actively support.
When social workers engage genuinely with registration requirements, the Code of Conduct, and continuous professional development, they are not just meeting compliance obligations. They are contributing to a system that exists to protect the people they serve.
Competence as an ongoing commitment
In Professor Paterson’s experience, the strongest models for meaningful competence assurance combine several elements: structured reflection on practice, peer feedback, and periodic external review – someone from outside coming in to look at a sample of work with fresh eyes.
Research suggests that while practitioners are often nervous about such processes, they consistently find them valuable. The feedback helps. It supports growth.
This resonates with what the SWRB hears from social workers: the most useful professional development is not abstract but grounded in real practice, real cases, and honest reflection.
The question for employers and the profession is how to build environments where that kind of reflection is genuinely supported, not squeezed out by workload and pressure.
The system and the individual
The conversation touched on a tension that will be familiar to many social workers: the relationship between systemic pressures and individual professional responsibility.
Social workers rarely act alone. They work within organisations, teams, and systems that can be under-resourced and overstretched. When things go wrong, it is rarely simple to point to a single decision or a single person.
Systemic thinking, in Professor Paterson’s view, does not dissolve individual responsibility. It contextualises it. Each registered professional, whatever the pressures of their environment, carries responsibilities that are their own: to maintain their competence, to act on their professional judgement, and to raise concerns when something is not right.
Being clear about those responsibilities – and supporting practitioners to meet them even in difficult conditions – is part of what good regulation can do.
What the public expects
Professor Paterson was candid about how public trust in professional regulators tends to be lower than professions might expect or hope. Building genuine public confidence takes time, consistency, and a willingness to be visible about the work that regulation does and why it matters.
For social workers and their employers, this is a shared interest. The standing of the profession in the eyes of the public is shaped not just by individual practice but by the collective commitment of the profession to its own standards.
The SWRB’s workforce survey findings suggest social workers feel the standing of the profession has grown since mandatory registration – and that is something to build on.
A valued conversation
We are grateful to Professor Paterson for his time and his generosity in sharing his thinking.
Conversations like this one – with people who have spent careers at the intersection of regulation, public policy, and professional practice – help shape how the SWRB thinks about its own work and its place in the wider regulatory community.
We look forward to continuing to share insights from these conversations as part of our commitment to open and engaged regulation.
