Challenges and Opportunities for Social Workers in Practice

This essay delves into the multifaceted world of social work, focusing specifically on the challenges and opportunities encountered by social workers, especially those working with older adults. The introduction establishes the crucial role of social workers in assisting individuals facing various problems, highlighting the need for mental and emotional strength to provide effective solutions. The main body of the essay explores the diverse roles and responsibilities of social workers, particularly in the context of geriatric care. It examines the challenges such as understanding the needs of older adults, resource allocation, managing family conflicts, and potential conflicts of interest. Simultaneously, the essay highlights the opportunities for social workers to build long-term relationships, enhance their expertise, and gain valuable insights into human behavior by identifying the needs of the elderly. The conclusion underscores the significance of these challenges and opportunities, emphasizing the importance of resilience and continuous professional growth for social workers dedicated to improving the lives of older adults.

Challenges and
Opportunities of Social
Workers

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY ..................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Social work is a profession that people choose for helping others dealing with their
different problems and serving them with solution. The person performing social activities are
known as Social Workers and their work depends on fields. Many clients comes from lower
sections of society who do not have basic survival resources for fulfilling their day to day needs.
Every social workers need to have some specific needs which enables them to perform their
duties. Social workers have to be very strong mentally and emotionally so that they can
understand peoples problems and provide them the best possible solutions(Brewer, Morris and
Piper, 2016). This essay is elaborating the challenges social workers face while working with
working with older adults. Also, it concentrates on various opportunities they get for better
learning and enhancing their skills along with serving best to others for whom they are working.
MAIN BODY
Social workers are the practising professionals promoting social changes and
development, social cohesion and empowerment of people. They are trained personnels who
carries out actions with aim of alleviating the conditions of those human beings who are
suffering from social deprivation and belongs to different communities. Professionals performing
social activities work with and for different ages groups, different genders and for various
agendas. Social workers working with older people and older adult groups have to adopt
different styles of performing their duties and behave more cautiously to provide them exactly
what they want and how they want things.
Every human being holds some basic rights which are same for everyone without
discriminating over age or gender or on any other basis(Rothman, 2018). Also, human beings
have different needs, deserving quality life. Older adults have equal rights like others in society
and they too have their personal wants which they wishes to fulfil for surviving and living a
quality life. These needs can be defined by some domains such as:
Material well being- This include basic needs like reasonable accommodation and
sufficient money to survive and maintain standard comfort. These are very essential for survival
and living easy life every day.

Social inclusion- It includes their wish or desire to be accepted socially by different
communities and segments of population. They wishes to contribute their part to the society for
supporting it.
Interpersonal relationship- This domains is about their contact with their family, older
adults needs to be in regular contact with their family members and friends to live a good quality
life. These relationships will fill them with love and emotions which enables them to be happy
and satisfied.
Social works plays several tasks with older people for providing them comfort and
helping them to spend quality life. Professionals performing social work for ageing people are
known as Gerontological or Geriatric social workers(Qualls, 2016). They coordinates the care of
elderly people in wide variety of settings like hospitals, health cares facilities and daytime health
care. They perform different roles for and on behalf of old people such as they act as their
advocates in outpatient settings, provide emotional, metal and social when they need and many
more.
As professional perform their actions many obstacles comes in their way, specifically
while working with and for older adults. These challenges hinder the motive of social
professionals to improve the living standards of people facing social deprive. Along with
challenges social workers also get better opportunities too for enhancing their service level and
for betterment of both older people they are serving to and themselves in career and attainment
of their objectives. All these barriers and new chances which comes in way of social workers are
mentioned below and thoroughly discussed in next paragraphs.
Challenges social workers face while working with older adults
Understanding the requirements- As age of human being increases their nature,
behaviour and needs changes. Main challenge social worker face while working for older people
is understanding them, how they behave and what exactly they want(Coulourides Kogan, Wilber
and Mosqueda, 2016). Older people are moody and considered as child, they needed to be taken
care of and have different wants. To manage their basic needs worker have to interact with them,
evaluate their behaviour and accordingly understand their needs. This thorough analysis will
works as guide for social professionals to perform their actions. But they are not sure if activities
they are performing will help satisfy wants of elderly people as by ageing their wants satisfaction

level regularly change which is a challenge. Social worker plans and actions have to flexible so
that they can modify them accordingly.
Allocating resources- Ageing comes with lots and lots of health problems which are
some times sever and involves huge resources. Nowadays, health check ups and medical
treatments are very expensive. Older people who belongs to lower social section can not afford it
or people whom are left by their families and living in old age home also can not take expensive
medical treatments. Therefore, money is the most important resource for social workers and one
challenge to arrange huge finances(Tsai, Shillair and Cotten, 2017). They get their funds from
different sources like from donations or from raising awareness in public or by making
arrangements with big organisations. Next, barrier comes after money is allocated then difficulty
comes in managing the health of old people. They needs to be taken care of every time as they
are kids. For doing so care takers or nurses needs to be appointed which is very another
troublesome task. Social workers have to search a lot for volunteers who are ready to do such
work for elderly people.
Managing family conflicts- Social workers are professionals working for different
people of and handling several problems of their clients. Sometimes families gets involved in
work of social workers. Managing family members and their conflicts becomes issue for
professionals and challenging as well. Professionals have to build strong relations with family
members, they have to understand them and then perform tasks. There are times when families
do not treat their elders properly and any intervention of social workers creates problems. They
put legal charges on institutions and social worker who was handling and working in order to
keep the rights of old people intact. These legal cases take lot of time and money to get resolved
and that is huge difficulty for social worker(Greene, 2017). Professionals have to put efforts
which are not in favour of their aims these are the waste of their time, efforts and skills. Their
main motive is to serves others and due to few problems they gets miss leaded from their path
and objectives.
Conflict of interest- Sometimes conflicts between professionals and their clients can also
arise. These conflicts depends on ethical responsibilities of social workers and requirements of
the elders person. For example, a client has a very sever disease which has to be cured as it is a
life or death situation. But the person denies to take treatments or inform to there family
members. In this case the responsibility of social worker is to make sure that the family is well

informed about the condition of client and also to be obedient of what client says. This is a
challenging situation where for social worker conflicts arises between his ethical duties and their
aim of providing what exactly asked by older adult.
Opportunities social workers get while working with older adults
Building long term relations- Social work is an activity people undertakes to serve other
with common objective of providing those people ease and comfort who needs it and cant not
afford it due to any reason. This is a selfless act which is performed by professionals but needs
help from other too. One person can not do good or bring change and that is why the more
people gets involved the more people are serves and provided ease. In case of serving elders
institutions or social working organisations or professionals need people with them and they are
known as volunteers(Hafford-Letchfield, 2016). These persons joins hands with the same
objective of serving people without any expectations of earning any other benefits. This is an
opportunity for social worker bring more people with them, helping them in their attaining their
aims and serving to maximum people who are in need. Aim of maintaining long term relations
with the volunteers can benefit company and they can be called every time company needs them.
Enhance their expertise- Social workers deals with many different situations and with
many people on daily basis. They have to interact with several human being on regular basis for
performing their tasks and duties. They also perform various roles for serving their clients and
the people who needs them according to their needs. Sometimes they work as advocate for
someone, on the other hand they educate other and spread awareness in public which relates to
their social work actions. All these different roles they perform and knowledge they gather from
these action will enhance their skills(Pitt-Catsouphes and et. al., 2017). These knowledge gained
by social workers enables them to increase their expertise and develop more effective manners to
help and serve public. This is a growth opportunity for every social professionals which enables
them to learn new things by every passing day. As their expertise increases and better skills are
developed by them it helps in influencing more people and attracting more and more experts
with their cause of helping older adults.
Identifying needs of people- Older generation is the most experienced segment of
population as they have lived their lives. Elder people have seen all up's and down's in their lives
and their knowledge is considered as the intangible assets for social workers. Professionals
associated with older generations and works for them get to learn new thing and life lessons from

them. These are the additional benefits they get in return to their services and activities they
perform for them. All the lessons they get from their clients help them to understand them better
and make good analysis of people in the world. They develop better understanding and analytical
skills which enables them to study human behaviour and the ways they will react. Better
understanding of human, their needs, their behaviour and trends will give an opportunities to
social worker to perform better. It helps them in achieving their aims and reaching to new
heights. By this they can actually serve and render their efforts in better manner to people and
helping more and more individuals along with older adults.
Social work is one profession which is selfless and in which no one expect any financial benefits.
While doing social work an individual have to be very strong mentally and on top of that they
have to be very strong emotionally(Challis and et al., 2016)(Dustin, D., 2016). They are gonna
face some challenges which are mentioned above and they have to be very strong and patient
while facing them. Not just challenges but social workers will also gain some opportunities by
which they can actually develop themselves and it enables them to achieve their aims in better
form. These opportunities and chances will help them to learn new thing that will serve as their
rewards and appreciations for doing something good for the society.
CONCLUSION
The essay above is about social workers working for older adults, these individuals are
known as Gerontological or Geriatric social workers. They are the one's working for serving
older adults and giving them comfort and ease they can not afford or cannot get without
somebody's help. Every human beings have some basic right and so as older adults, social
professionals assist them in gaining advantage of those rights and fulfilling their needs. They
perform different actions and activities in order to help older people to live a comfortable life.
Many challenges and barriers are faced by them while doing their work and serving people
which they had to move forward with keeping themselves strong. New opportunities and new
doors also opens for them which enhance their skills and expertise. They even develop more
knowledge and learn new lessons every day which acts as their rewards.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Brewer, R., Morris, M.R. and Piper, A.M., 2016, May. Why would anybody do this?:
Understanding older adults' motivations and challenges in crowd work. In Proceedings
of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (pp. 2246-
2257). ACM.
Challis, D., and et al., 2016. Supporting people with dementia at home: Challenges and
opportunities for the 21st century. Routledge.
Coulourides Kogan, A., Wilber, K. and Mosqueda, L., 2016. Moving Toward Implementation of
Person‐Centered Care for Older Adults in Community‐Based Medical and Social
Service Settings:“You Only Get Things Done When Working in Concert with Clients”.
Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 64(1). pp.e8-e14.
Dustin, D., 2016. The McDonaldization of social work. Routledge.
Greene, R.R., 2017. Social work with the aged and their families. Routledge.
Hafford-Letchfield, T., 2016. Learning in later life: Challenges for social work and social care.
Routledge.
Pitt-Catsouphes, and et. al., 2017. Innovative pathways to meaningful work: Older adults as
volunteers and self-employed entrepreneurs. In The Palgrave handbook of age diversity
and work. (pp. 195-224). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Qualls, S.H., 2016. Caregiving families within the long-term services and support system for
older adults. American Psychologist. 71(4). p.283.
Rothman, J., 2018. Social work practice across disability. Routledge.
Tsai, H.Y.S., Shillair, R. and Cotten, S.R., 2017. Social support and “playing around” an
examination of how older adults acquire digital literacy with tablet computers. Journal
of Applied Gerontology. 36(1). pp.29-55.