SOCW 6530 wk 8 peer responses 

Respond to the blog posts of three colleagues in one or more of the following ways:

Share an insight from having read your colleague’s posting.

Validate an idea in your colleague’s post with your own experience.

MUST RESPOND TO EACH ONE SEPARATELY CITE EVERYTHING AND FULL REFERENCES 

PEER 1: David Jones 

An Explanation of Potential Challenges for Evaluation During Your Field Education Experience

Evaluation occurs in different ways during the field education experience. I receive evaluation from my field instructor on my performance at the therapy office. I also evaluate the clients that I have interactions with while interning. Both of which can pose separate types of challenges. Receiving constructive criticism can be difficult for some. A potential challenge with receiving the evaluation and criticism from my field instructor would be my inability to do so in a short period and apply it. However, it is imperative to use this feedback to critique and affirm my own practice (Garthwait, 2017, p.36). A potential challenge that I face in my evaluation of the clients is that it may be difficult to measure outcomes in such a short amount of time. We only have 11 weeks in each semester to get involved in our client interventions and many of the circumstances require much longer than that.

An Explanation of Personal Action Plans You Might Take to Address Evaluation in Your Field Education Experience

I believe an action plan for the potential challenges faced with the evaluation from the instructor is to take notes on the information being shared and allow processing time. I write notes with questions to ensure I understand what is being said, and ask any questions I may have about improving my practice. As far as an action plan for the potential challenge of evaluating the clients, I can conduct a pre/post survey of the clients I was able to work with to see what they have learned and utilized from the class currently and again at the final weeks. I can also follow up with my field instructor after I stop interning, to see how influential I have been on them.

reference

Garthwait, C. L. (2017). The social work practicum: A guide and workbook for students (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

PEER 2  Candise Mitchell 

Sometimes complex social problems require complex interventions, and sometimes they respond well to simple interventions (Thyer, 2013). This simplicity also applies to social worker procedures and protocol. Being a social worker is not an easy task. It is easy to think that it consists of just talking to others, but the interventions, research, and paperwork can be more challenging than a defiant client. Within my internship I have learned a great deal regarding client care and interactions for with adults and couples regarding trauma, domestic violence, couples counseling, anger management, and self-care just to name a few. However, the challenges within my placement largely consisted of communication. There was a serious mix-up regarding timesheets and monthly reports. They were being completed but due to a lack of communication and direction, they were being sent to the wrong department. This caused a lot of tension between several departments regarding communication, time management, and organization skills. The fall through of communication was a major challenge that could have been avoided; however, it is important to understand that these challenges are teachable moments within internship placements. The paperwork has been completed and each department is happy but moving forward I will not rely on the communication of others but conduct my own department check-ins and communication to ensure that client cases are being reported properly.

Thyer, B. A. (2013). Evidence-based practice or evidence-guided practice: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet [Invited response to Gitterman & Knight’s “evidence-guided practice”]. Families in Society, 94(2), 79–84.

PEER 3 Seshna Ritchie  

Reliable and valid standardized instruments, such as the geriatric depression scale, are not commonly used by hospice social workers (Parker Oliver, Wittenberg-Lyles, Washington, & Sehrawat, 2009). Unlike the numeric pain scale or other tools for pain assessment supporting the nurses, hospice social workers have not agreed upon ways to measure the psychosocial issues facing their clients. While some within the hospice social work community have developed standardized assessment tools –the Social Work Assessment Tool (Reese et al., 2006) is one example–their adoption has been limited. The lack of standardized assessment often results in an unfocused intervention (Parker Oliver, et al., 2009). Unfocused interventions can leave hospice social workers with an ambiguous identity on the team, unable to articulate their role in terms understood by the medical team members, and unable to determine the effectiveness of their work, and difficultly in evaluating the social work scope of work in hospice. At Infinity Hospice, data for the work social workers do are tracked through a metric system. Each time the social worker provides therapeutic emotional support or helps to connect the patient to community resources we document in our EMR system the task completed and update the metric which is measured in percentages 0-100%. The social worker records and updates their percentages after each interaction, the issues with this type of measurement tool are that it does not fully capture the efforts done by the social worker as typically 100 is never reach by time of death. However, the company reports the data to Medicare to stay in compliance. Evaluation is done differently in hospice social work, and we do not complete individual evaluations but other documents and records to measure outcomes overall as an interdisciplinary team that met the Plan of Care for the patient upon death or discharge.

Reference

Parker Oliver D, Wittenberg-Lyles E, Washington K, Sehrawat S. (2009). Social Work role in hospice pain management: A national survey. Journal of Social Work in End of Life and Palliative Care. 2009;5(1–2):61–74. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814550/

Reese DJ, Raymer M, Orloff SF, Gerbino S, Valade R, Dawson S, et al. (2006). The Social Work Assessment Tool (SWAT) Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care. 2006;2(2):65–95. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]