This unique self-instructional text involves students in the learning process and helps them develop and apply the skills needed for working with people. It presents comprehensive coverage of major practice areas - brokering, consumer advocacy, mobilizing, interviewing, case management, relationship building, and assessment. Encouraging students to view people in a positive way with the ability to change, the fourth edition contains a new chapter on managing the transition to new service delivery systems, updated material on clinical methods, revised material on policy practice, and updated cases that reflect a stronger emphasis on diversity.
Will your agency or students have the training to use the Internet in practice? Human Services Online: A New Arena for Service Delivery focuses on ways that Human Services are using the Internet for service delivery, community education, collaboration, advocacy, social change, and resource development. This valuable book highlights the array of innovative services now being offered on the Internet and provides guidelines and cautions for human service professionals in using the Internet to enhance their services. Human Services Online: A New Arena for Service Delivery provides much-needed research and empirical evaluation related to human service online activities and points to areas where future research efforts should be directed. The book describes and evaluates cutting-edge Internet-based services, ethical and legal threats to agencies and consumers that may result from online activities, and theoretical discussions of issues that impact human services as consumers and human service agencies increasingly come online. Topics addressed in Human Services Online: A New Arena for Service Delivery include: online therapy/counseling online fundraising online recruitment of volunteers and virtual volunteer programs online consultation, continuing education, and training ethical, legal, and liability issues related to Web sites and online support online support groups and self-help online advocacy and activism promoting access for under-represented populations use of the Internet to impact specific social problems such as domestic violence or HIV/AIDS Human Services Online: A New Arena for Service Delivery provides guidelines and specific suggestions for agencies considering developing online services. The book examines model programs and their effectiveness so that other agencies can replicate them in their own areas, describes cutting-edge online services that today's human services students will need to be aware of as they enter the job market, and provides information for agencies that will enhance their ability to solicit volunteers and contributions on the Internet.
The traditional lines of demarcation between service providers and service users are shifting. Professionals in managed service organizations are working to incorporate the voices of service users into their missions and the way they function, and service users, with growing access to knowledge, have taken on the semblances of professional expertise. Additionally, the human services environment has been transformed by administrative imperatives. The drive toward greater efficiency and accountability has weakened the bond between users and providers. Reimagining the Human Service Relationship is informed by the premise that the helping relationship should be seen as developing in the interactive space between those who provide human services and those who receive them. The contributors to this volume redefine the contours, roles, institutional divisions, means, and aims of providing and receiving services in a range of settings, including child welfare, addiction treatment, social enterprise, doctoring, mental health, and palliative care. Though they advocate an experience-near approach, they remain sensitive to the ambiguities and competing rationalities of the service relationship. Taken together, these chapters reimagine the service relationship by making visible the working relevancies of service delivery.
Social work practice with refugees and immigrants requires specialized knowledge of these populations and specialized adaptations and applications of mainstream services and interventions. Because they are often confronted with cultural, linguistic, political, and socioeconomic barriers, these groups are especially vulnerable to psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, alienation, grief, and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as concerns arising from inadequate health care. Institutionalized discrimination and anti-immigrant policies and attitudes only exacerbate these challenges. The second edition of Best Practices for Social Work with Refugees and Immigrants offers an update to this comprehensive guide to social work with foreign-born clients and an evaluation of various helping strategies and their methodological strengths and weaknesses. Part 1 sets forth the context for evidence-based service approaches for such clients by describing the nature of these populations, relevant policies designed to assist them, service-delivery systems, and culturally competent practice. Part 2 addresses specific problem areas common to refugees and immigrants and evaluates a variety of assessment and intervention techniques in each area. Using a rigorous evidence-based and pancultural approach, Miriam Potocky and Mitra Naseh identify best practices at the macro, meso, and micro levels to meet the pressing needs of uprooted peoples. The new edition incorporates the latest research on contemporary social work practice with refugees and immigrants to provide a practical, up-to-date resource for the multitude of issues and interventions for these populations.
Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.
In the past, when people with disabilities and older adults needed help with activities of daily living and navigating their communities, they rarely had any choice about who helped them, when that support was delivered, or what the worker would or would not do. The self-direction movement changed all that by offering people the option to select their own workers and even create an individualized budget to help them live more independently. Written by experts who played a key part in the growth, evaluation, and dissemination of this revolutionary approach, Self-Direction describes the development of this movement through the authors' personal accounts. Also included are stories from actual participants in the movement who benefitted from this approach and from policymakers who saw how self-direction could help address states' problems. The book's conclusion discusses recommendations that can improve the way self-direction is delivered and how to spread its message so that all people with disabilities can have this choice.
Government and nongovernmental human service organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their programs work. As stakeholders demand more accountability, human service organizations are increasingly utilizing performance accountability and performance measurement as a way of demonstrating the efficiency, quality, and effectiveness of their programs. Measuring the Performance of Human Service Programs, Second Edition examines the reasons why performance measurement has become the major method of performance accountability today. In this second edition of their classic work, Martin & Kettner explain in detail how to develop and utilize output, quality, and outcome performance measures in human service programs. Special attention is given to the four types of outcome performance measures: numeric counts, standardized measures, level of functioning (LOF) scales and client satisfaction.
Organizations today { whether public or private { exist in environment s where the pace of change is dizzying. Human service organizations fa ce both external and internal challenges: The public demands better se rvices at more reasonable costs. Clientele is more diverse, more strat ified, and more vocal than ever. The organizations themselves must kee p up with rapid changes in technological innovation and labor-manageme nt relationships. Organizational Change: The Human Services Challenge looks at the context of organizational change, describes how individua ls and systems change, and pinpoints keys to successful change. Author Rebecca Proehl then presents a proven model of organizational change, built on lessons learned from both the public and private sectors, bu t tailored for human service organizations. Proehl also discusses in d epth labor union-management issues, the political strategies leaders m ust use to implement change, and how to build collaborative relationsh ips in human services.
For the last thirty years, the nation's mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault, with dramatically rising costs and the fragmentation of service delivery rendering them incapable of ensuring the safety, security, and recovery of their clients. The resulting organizational trauma both mirrors and magnifies the trauma-related problems their clients seek relief from. Just as the lives of people exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become organized around the traumatic experience, so too have our social service systems become organized around the recurrent stress of trying to do more under greater pressure: they become crisis-oriented, authoritarian, disempowered, and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future. Complex interactions among traumatized clients, stressed staff, pressured organizations, and a social and economic climate that is often hostile to recovery efforts recreate the very experiences that have proven so toxic to clients in the first place. Healing is possible for these clients if they enter helping, protective environments, yet toxic stress has destroyed the sanctuary that our systems are designed to provide. This thoughtful, impassioned critique of business as usual begins to outline a vision for transforming our mental health and social service systems. Linking trauma theory to organizational function, Destroying Sanctuary provides a framework for creating truly trauma-informed services. The organizational change method that has become known as the Sanctuary Model lays the groundwork for establishing safe havens for individual and organizational recovery. The goals are practical: improve clinical outcomes, increase staff satisfaction and health, increase leadership competence, and develop a technology for creating and sustaining healthier systems. Only in this way can our mental health and social service systems become empowered to make a more effective contribution to the overall health of the nation. Destroying Sanctuary is a stirring call for reform and recovery, required reading for anyone concerned with removing the formidable barriers to mental health and social services, from clinicians and administrators to consumer advocates.
