Social work, social values, and health.
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Social work is concerned with enhancing the well-being of people within their social contexts. It is a broad profession with diverse practices. These range from a focus on the personal distress of individuals to the collective arrangements and social processes that influence the well-being of groups and communities. The unique contribution of social work to the caring professions is its broad contextualised approach to addressing human needs. Yet this breadth of scope also provides fertile ground for competing discourses within the profession. This paper provides an overview of the 'highly contested' nature of social work's goals, theories and methods of practice.
Social work intervention in Self-Care involves evaluation, preparation, crisis-intervention and ongoing assessment and support. Early introduction of this modality is considered vital and factors of age, education, socio-economic level, sensory and environmental conditions are considered in the evaluation process. The social work relationship with patients is described within the context of family and community supports. Experience has demonstrated that patients with pre-existing adaptation problems may require more concentrated social work counseling. The goals of independence and rehabilitation are shown to be effected by patient motivation and economic restrictions. The social worker participating in the team approach is described as contributing to the patients opportunity for self-determination through patient advocacy, supportive services and social action. Self-Care patients are considered as having high potential for achievement and satisfaction.
Social workers have long been involved in developing, administering, and providing services for people with psychiatric disabilities. Critics of the system, including social workers and mental health consumer-survivor practitioners, have noted that the medical model has been a driving force in policy and services provision. This model is detrimental to consumers' self-efficacy and sense of hope and conflicts with a number of central social work values. The article argues that the values and beliefs of the consumer-survivor recovery movement are closely aligned with those of the profession, and that the movement offers social workers a more promising perspective from which to practice. The primary concepts and values of the evolving recovery paradigm are delineated, and implications for direct practice, administration, policy making, education, and research are discussed.
At present social work is almost unheard of in China. Grassroots responses to the needs of mentally ill people and their families, based on the use of untrained officials and volunteers, are insufficient. In some cases, intervention may be unwelcome because of the stigma that surrounds mental illness in China and the families' desire to keep the matter private. The problems and difficulties--practical, emotional, and social--that families and patients face are not dissimilar to those of their counterparts in the West. Doctors and nurses adopt a biological explanatory model and show little interest in the wider environment of the patient, even when environmental factors can be clearly demonstrated to impinge on the illness. The authors conclude that there is a role and a need for social workers in psychiatric settings in China. Although this would undoubtedly be social work with Chinese characteristics, it would be recognizable as consistent with professional social work practice elsewhere.
This study of 238 social work students in 27 hospital field work programs examined how student satisfaction with field work affects their willingness to accept employment in host hospitals. Job willingness was positively correlated with five measures of student satisfaction. Factors predictive of each measure were identified. Findings suggest strategies that can be used by hospital social work managers and field work supervisors to enhance student satisfaction with the field work experience, in order to maximize the benefit of providing field work education as a way of recruiting graduating students for employment in hospital settings.
In their traditional fields, social workers increasingly have to deal with elderly people. Social work is implemented also in special facilities and services for old persons. In the basic education there is still no guarantee of a basic knowledge in social gerontology. This ist why further education programs are necessary. In a postgraduate curriculum the social work experience should be combined with the theoretical basis of social gerontology.
Conflicting values and issues emerge when hospital and professional school converge to educate the next generation of the profession. These values derive from issues of authority, responsibility, accountability, status, communication, and mutuality. This paper identifies their occurrence, describes a method for managing them, and delineates a hospital social work department's role in developing an educationally based, practice focused practicum site. The components and results of the relationship between the department and the school, including details of the practicum model, are discussed.
A commintment to the concept of total patient care requires consideration of the social and emotional, as well as the physical, problems of the patient. Assessing the quality of the social work service--including adequate attention to problem evaluation, social treatment, and outcome--can help to assure that patients will return to as high a level of social functioning as possible.
The aim of the study was to test the U.S.A. Validated 'Attitude Towards Disabled Persons' Inventory (A.T.D.P. Form O) on a British student population to establish norms. The objectives were to test specific hypotheses related to the sex of the respondent, contact with physically disabled people and whether social work students had different attitude scores than non social work students. In addition, a comparison was made between the British and U.S.A. 'norms'. The student population of four specific British Universities comprised the sampling frame. The sample was a non probability accidental sample of social work and non social work students. Standardised A.T.D.P. Form Os were administered in group situations. Each form was accompanied by a letter explaining the study, together with a short questionnaire eliciting the sex of respondent and type and extent of any contact with disabled people. The findings demonstrated that there are probably differences between U.S.A. and British norms but that there are general similarities between the two countries. In both countries females, scored higher than males, which by interpretation indicates possibly a more favourable attitude. Contact with the disabled is also a contributing factor in higher scores. Social work students also tended to score more highly than non social work students. The implications of these findings are discussed with regard to the possible development of professional attitudes for those who work with the disabled. It is postulated that 'idealisation' may be reflected in attitudes of students who intend to work with the disabled which, after general and professional life experience gives way to less favourable attitudes. Closeness of contact of respondents to disabled people is a factor which needs further exploration in connection with changing attitude scores.
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The economic and social philosophies of the "New Right" which emphasise individualism and self-fulfillment have become wide-spread. In the last two decades it has grown particularly strong in Western societies. Self-fulfillment of the individual now commands its own moral imperative, and promotes the shutting out of the greater issues and concerns (political, historical and religious) that transcend the self. This paper examines the impact of "New Right" ideologies on social workers and social work practice, with particular reference to social workers in New Zealand's largest mental health institution, Porirua Hospital. It argues that a life course approach is necessary to understand social variations in health. It explores the accumulation of risk for the underprivileged in the market environment, with its concomitant constraints on human services. The paper reviews the inherent and fundamental conflict of objectives in the ethical positioning of social organizations, as against those of the ew Right." Finally, the paper argues for social and economic policies that would defend the socio-economically disadvantaged against an accumulation of risk in the critical periods of their life. It highlights survival strategies for social work in a marginalizing practice environment.
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Over the past two decades, social workers have treated trauma survivors in a variety of settings. Interest has increased in the effect of this work on clinicians. Vicarious traumatization is a concept used to understand the impact of trauma work on clinicians. This article describes a study of social work clinicians working with two types of trauma: (1) the human-induced trauma, sexual abuse, and (2) the naturally caused trauma, cancer. The effect on clinician's cognitive schemas and the confounding variables of personal history of abuse and years' experience are described. Clinicians who worked primarily with clients who were sexually abused reported more disruptions in cognitive schemas than clinicians who worked with clients who had cancer. Implications for social practice and education are described.
OBJECTIVES: The task profile of social work in (acute) inpatient psychotherapy--unlike psychiatric inpatient treatment--is only fragmentarily described by the so-called Psychiatrie-Personalverordnung (Psych-PV). The aim of the present investigation was, therefore, to provide valid and representative data to define its respective scope of duties. METHODS: During a prospective one-year assessment at the Department of Psychotherapy and Behavioral Medicine at the Philipps-University of Marburg/Germany, we recorded corresponding data of social work referring to three areas of interest, i.e., "education and occupation", "housing and family", and "psychotherapy support". RESULTS: Our data suggest a broad overlap with the corresponding task profile of social work at psychiatric hospitals, which clearly differs, however, from the more therapeutical approach in social work as practiced in Anglo-American countries. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings stress the need for a re-evaluation of social work in inpatient psychotherapy concerning its specific task profile and the respective time values.
The relation between social work and social medicine is the subject of this article. Social work is an independent discipline creating its own knowledge in scientific cooperation with other disciplines. Social Medicine is outlined with its special features as a field and as a medical discipline. The traditional relation between social work and the discipline of Social Medicine operates side by side. Since Social Medicine and social work refer to each other, new perspectives for the development of health-related social work arise. Social Medicine appeared in social work can help in elaborating a sociogenetic model of understanding health and illness as well as the development of sociotherapy in social work. Health-related social work will gain more significance in the treatment of health-related and disease-related questions.
This article examines the question of how universities can be encouraged to address the mental health concerns of GLBT-SQ people and communities from a perspective of solidarity. In so doing, the authors take a case study approach, using Project Interaction: The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Two-Spirit Initiative of McGill University's School of Social Work, to critically reflect upon the challenges arising from the development of an alternative organization within academia. The purpose of this reflection is to highlight how normal operations at work on university campuses, and within health and allied health curriculum, can be disrupted with the goal of providing momentum for the creation of affirmative space, the advancement of educational initiatives, and the building of opportunities for social change.