Is There a Role for Social Workers Working with the Dying - Research Paper Example

Social care workers provide all non-medical professional help counseling and looking after a gamut of activities from finance to funeral management. This calls for a versatile approach and availability of 24X7. The work of social care is further made difficult by general lack of awareness about hospice and palliative care. The workplace challenges make the profession all the satisfying and rewarding. Social care work is often wrongly taken as an unnecessary burden. The notion is belied by the fact that attempts to scale down the role of social care workers have resulted in rising in healthcare costs.

Despite severe work conditions, the movement for including the social care staff in the hospice and palliative care teams continues to grow.Social work involves working with the most vulnerable sections of society. Social work seeks to improve the opportunities of life by dealing with individuals, people, families, careers, and communities through the commitment to five basic values of Human Dignity and Worth, Social justice, Service to Humanity, Integrity and Competence (BASW).Social work is self-directed learning, and a profession with an obligation to the service users, the employers, to one another, and to their colleagues in the same discipline or another.

Social work involves supporting others to improve the quality of life through individual well-being and autonomy while respecting the rights of others. In light of ecology theory, the social worker performs at the point of intervention of people with the surroundings; by identifying problems that affect care and helps formulate a plan that mobilizes supportive care from the environment thus enhancing well-being through empowerment, and liberation of people. Social workers intervene in transactions between al!

subsystems in the clients' environment, which includes interactions with the team.