Role of Medical Social Workers in Emergency Care Settings

This article discusses the role of medical social workers in emergency care settings, including their responsibilities, challenges, and ways to address them.

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
Name of the student:
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Author’s note

1HEALTH CARE
Post discussion
I have chosen the emergency unit as one of the setting. Emergency units are departments
in a health care setting where emergency treatment is provide to patients with acute illness
without any appointment. Various type of patient arrives at the emergency department for
treatment such as those with chronic illness, people with a fracture or people with severe injury
due to car accident. The main pressures of working in this department is the need to provide
services to patient as early as possible and avoid the hassles created due to delay of care and
overcrowding in the hospital (Gehlert & Browne, 2012). For this reason, it is regarded as the
most challenging department to work in. Staffs need to deal with patients with life threatening
situations like injuries due to motor vehicle accidents, severe form or drug abuse and cancer or
even risky behavioural problems like aggressiveness and mental illness. Medical social worker is
one health care professional who take on diverse role.
According to Beder (2006), social workers play a role in assessment of patient,
relationship building, making discharge plans and providing psychosocial support to patients.
The activities that help them in the clinical assessment process includes engaging with the client,
supporting them throughout the intervention process, identifying patient strengths and addressing
cultural issues for patient. In addition, they also play a key role in reducing rate of hospital
readmissions by developing proper discharge plan. Through their communication skills, they
identify the needs of patient and give proper referral advice to them. Due to their vast knowledge
about community health resources and services, they play a crucial role in discharge planning.
Most importantly, emergency room social worker plays a key role in collaborating with the
multidisciplinary team. They provide support to the medical team by completing several tasks.
This involves supporting patients during appointments, providing emotional support to patient
and giving them financial and resource related assistance (Findley, 2014).
Medical social workers experience various challenges in their role too. For example, they
are faced with unique challenges and ethical dilemmas when any patient death takes place during
emergency care. In addition, dealing with aggressive patients or family members becomes
difficult in case of patient deterioration events. In addition, they are often involved in completing
multiples task such as completing documentation work and develop discharge sheet (Findley,
2014). Due to the complexities and large amount of work at hand, insufficient time to complete
the entire assigned work can becomes a major challenge for social workers. They often report not
getting adequate time to complete their work leading to burnout and psychological stress. They
are often overburdened with care loads (Beder, 2006). Hence, the likelihood of frustration is
high. To address the challenge of high workload and insufficient time to complete the work, it is
suggested that the hospital administrators become proactive in addressing burnout and high
workload issues. They can ensure that each social worker are given enough time to process the
cases. Keeping adequate number of social staffs as per the patient load can also be beneficial in
addressing timing related challenges for patient.

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References:
Beder, J. (2006). Hospital social work: The interface of medicine and caring. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Findley, P. A. (2014). Social work practice in the chronic care model: Chronic illness and
disability care. Journal of Social Work, 14(1), 83-95.
Gehlert, S., & Browne, T. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of health social work (2nd ed.). Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley.