Hospital Social Work: The Interface of Medicine and Caring

The field of medical social work is an area of social work that many students find appealing, as it presents them with an opportunity to experience a wide range of situations, patients, and challenges within a concentrated time and location. And while many schools of social work offer a variety of courses on health care issues, hospital work, and social work in health care settings, most of the literature in the field has focused on either the political, economic and social issues involved in the work, or alternatively on the how-to aspects of the field. Joan Beder, a Brunner-Routledge author who has enjoyed success in both academia and clinical practice, recently noted an apparent lack of empirical discussion of the actual - as opposed to the theoretical, idealized - role and real day-to-day functioning of the medical social worker. Through her own work in medical settings and her classroom experience with texts, the author has seen a need for a unique supplemental text that would also be of use topracticing medical social workers. The result is this proposed book, which begins by detailing the history of the field in the US and abroad, and brings the reader up-to-date through the impacts of managed care and recent hospital reforms. Chapters will focus on social work in specific units of health care, such as the burn unit, dialysis unit, pediatric AIDS unit, hospice, surgical unit, and oncology unit. The bulk of the text will be centered on a series of interviews of practicing social workers in these different areas, based on a standard set of questions and given by the author. The author intends to interview social workers from both urban and rural settings, as well as hospitals and institutions of differing sizes and coverage areas. The responses to these survey questions will be collated and discussed within each chapter, so that large issues can be addressed, while specific advice and information relevant to work within the smaller units will be easily accessible to the reader. These"voices" from people in the field will orient the reader with first-hand experiences, while discussions of practice principles, policy considerations, and theoretical treatments will provide each chapter with a unique blend of theory and practice. Medical social work is a field with international applications, and while significant differences between national health care systems exist, a unique text such as this should have world-wide appeal.

Joan Beder is a Professor at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University in New York.