Browsing by Subject "Social work"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Closing the Gap: Increasing Community Mental Health Services in Rural Indiana
    (Springer Nature, 2021) Schultz, Kristi; Farmer, Sara; Harrell, Sam; Hostetter, Carol; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Due to the significant need for mental health services in rural Martin County, IN and lack of providers, this study examined the current strengths of the community as well as the barriers preventing mental health service delivery. The goal of the study was to propose community-specific solutions to overcoming the barriers. Using a strengths-based approach (Saleeby in The strengths perspective in social work practice, Longman, White Plains, NY, 1992), the authors first sought to understand Martin County residents’ current experiences with mental health services. Second, the authors sought to understand Martin County residents’ opinions about church/mental health partnerships. As a result of this analysis, the authors comprised a list of feasible and sustainable recommendations for Martin County and similar rural areas that incorporate the strengths in the community, address their identified challenges, and thus created a model for mental health service provision that can be replicated in other rural communities with similar strengths as well as similar challenges.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Community Inclusion for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
    (Indiana University School of Social Work, 2021) Presnell, Jade; Keesler, John; School of Social Work
    Many people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are isolated and lack meaningful opportunities to participate and develop social networks within their communities. Sharing membership with a community that fosters connection and belonging is essential to well-being. As a human rights profession, social work is uniquely situated to overcome the macro barriers that prevent full community inclusion for people with IDD. However, the experiences and needs of those with IDD have largely been left out of the profession’s discourse on diversity and oppression. This article presents a call-to-action for social work to engage in strategies and solutions to resolve macro barriers to community inclusion, to dismantle the injustices that people with IDD continue to experience, and to move the promise of community inclusion from rhetoric to reality. Social workers can promote community inclusion for people with IDD through a variety of approaches, including using a human rights-based framework, aligning with person-centered planning, fostering evidence-based practices, using participatory action research, increasing disability content in social work curricula, and engaging in community action and advocacy.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Dismantling White Supremacy in Social Work Education: We Build the Road by Walking
    (Indiana University School of Social Work, 2021) Yearwood, Charla Cannon; Barbera, Rosemary A.; Fisher, Amy K.; Hostetter, Carol; School of Social Work
    We are excited to share this special edition of Advances in Social Work with you. When we distributed a call for abstracts, we were inundated – in a good way – with proposals. The need for social workers to discuss the role that white supremacy occupies within our history, education, and practice was obvious. Because of the number of abstracts received, we made the decision to publish a double edition so that the important information contained in these articles can be widely shared. The submissions fell into three general themes--historical, instructional, and institutional examinations. Each set of articles offers much for us to reflect and act upon moving forward. There is a reckoning happening and we are thrilled that this special edition is part of that reckoning. In all, we hope that this special issue will help advance our conversations in social work education around white supremacy and how it influences our practice, research, and education. Recognizing that our Code of Ethics calls us to “pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups”, we believe it is important for social work as a profession to consistently evaluate its own institutions for ways we can practice what we preach. As social work educators, we have the ethical and moral responsibility to learn, grow, and challenge ourselves. We can do better. We must do better.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Forming Identities of Their Own: Gay Men Reconciling Self-love, Hurt, and the Impact of the Pentecostal Church
    (Taylor & Francis, 2023) Swafford, Tayon R.; Brandon-Friedman, Richard A.
    According to data analyzed from the Gallup Daily Tracking Politics and Economy survey between 2015 and 2017, nearly half (46.7%) of LGBT adults in the U.S. are religious, and just over half (53.3%) of LGBT adults are not religious. The majority who identified as religious attend Protestant churches. The Pentecostal church is a member of the Protestant Christian tradition. In a Constructivist Grounded Theory study of six U.S. gay male, Pentecostal Christians, our study excavates and chronicles their journey toward wholeness. Three major themes emerged from our study: embracing the journey, belonging to a community, and living unapologetically. From these themes, we learned that wholeness becomes possible when gay male Christians can form identities that are uniquely and holistically their own. We used these themes as a clarion call for clinicians who engage with clients encountering a conflict between their religious/spiritual tradition and their sexual orientation to actively assist their clients with reducing the dissonance they experience.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Pivoting the Profession as We Approach the Quasquicentennial
    (Indiana University School of Social Work, 2022) Menon, Goutham M.; Mondros, Jacqueline; Smyth, Nancy J.; Teasley, Martell; Hostetter, Carol; School of Social Work
    The year 2023 marks professional social work’s quasquicentennial: the 125th anniversary of our profession since the first social work classes were offered in the summer of 1898 at Columbia University. The profession has grown in its reach across many human service sectors over all these years creating opportunities for those who want to serve their communities in myriad and impactful ways. As we observe disruptions in the higher education sector, with profound implications to the mission of the social work profession, we are also witnessing many cross-sector opportunities for the future of the social work profession. Given our changing environment, the time is right for us to re-envision social work education and practice in ways that center our professions’ commitment to social justice and the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. In our efforts to meet the needs of the people and communities we serve, we have seen several innovative and impactful expansions into areas that have augmented our original “scope of practice.” Some have occurred to meet the needs of the time; others have morphed due to market conditions for jobs that have been encroached on by other professions/disciplines. And as we see more complex and vexing societal issues in our current environment, it is time for us to collectively discern our purpose, adjust our mindset, and be prepared to meet future challenges and opportunities. This special issue on “re-envisioning social work” provides a space for thought leaders to showcase meaningful and purpose-filled advances for the profession.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Role of Social Workers in Addressing Patients' Unmet Social Needs in the Primary Care Setting
    (2021-04) Bako, Abdulaziz Tijjani; Vest, Joshua R.; Blackburn, Justin; Walter-McCabe, Heather; Kasthurirathne, Suranga; Menachemi, Nir
    Unmet social needs pose significant risk to both patients and healthcare organizations by increasing morbidity, mortality, utilization, and costs. Health care delivery organizations are increasingly employing social workers to address social needs, given the growing number of policies mandating them to identify and address their patients’ social needs. However, social workers largely document their activities using unstructured or semi-structured textual descriptions, which may not provide information that is useful for modeling, decision-making, and evaluation. Therefore, without the ability to convert these social work documentations into usable information, the utility of these textual descriptions may be limited. While manual reviews are costly, time-consuming, and require technical skills, text mining algorithms such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) offer cheap and scalable solutions to extracting meaningful information from large text data. Moreover, the ability to extract information on social needs and social work interventions from free-text data within electronic health records (EHR) offers the opportunity to comprehensively evaluate the outcomes specific social work interventions. However, the use of text mining tools to convert these text data into usable information has not been well explored. Furthermore, only few studies sought to comprehensively investigate the outcomes of specific social work interventions in a safety-net population. To investigate the role of social workers in addressing patients’ social needs, this dissertation: 1) utilizes NLP, to extract and categorize the social needs that lead to referral to social workers, and market basket analysis (MBA), to investigate the co-occurrence of these social needs; 2) applies NLP, ML, and deep learning techniques to extract and categorize the interventions instituted by social workers to address patients’ social needs; and 3) measures the effects of receiving a specific social work intervention type on healthcare utilization outcomes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    SCAFFOLDING IN INTERPROFESSIONAL EDUCATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION
    (2015-09-30) Anderson, Jennifer June; Adamek, Margaret E.; Chonody, Jill M.; Hall, James A.; Rouse, Susan M.; Szarleta, Ellen J.
    Medical errors due to failure to communicate and collaborate are one of the top causes of death in the United States. Interprofessional education (IPE) is an integrated instructional approach where various health care disciplines create opportunities for students to learn together in order to function as cohesive, effective, and collaborative interprofessional teams. Successful IPE program design is a multi-faceted challenge, especially for social work educators in light of the changes in EPAS 2015. Academic institutions are being encouraged to offer IPE programs; faculty members are then charged with developing IPE programs for their institutions. IPE program design could generate a multitude of advantages for students, faculty, academic programs, professions, university partners, and communities—provided the approach is systematic and inclusive. This prospectus will explore IPE program design in field settings for social work faculty as a scaffold design, which targets proactive understanding of resources and applications. The prospectus will explore three interrelated special considerations: 1) the connections between IPE and social work education; 2) the learning needs (learning styles and fear of negative evaluation) of students most likely to be invited to participate in an IPE program; and 3) the needs of field instructors and needs of social work students in relation to their field experience. Social work faculty as program developers new to IPE will gain insights from this work and be better able to concurrently layer educational outcomes with professional gains, while initiating opportunities for interprofessional collaborative practice skill-building in field settings—ultimately enhancing health outcomes.