The purpose of this blog is to analyze potential challenges for intervention and discuss personal action plans in the field education experience at Vatsalya Adult Medical Daycare Center that might be implemented to address assessment. Different levels of intervention should be introduced to efficiently respond to social problems of disadvantaged and diverse clients. The social worker should approach intervention challenges by employing an ecosystems perspective, allowing to understand the interaction between the client and the environment.
Social work practitioners might encounter different intervention challenges during their field education experience. In order to improve the client’s well-being and therapy outcomes, the social worker should be able to recognize problems negatively impacting the social functioning of their clients and offer appropriate interventions (Garthwait, 2017). The main challenge is to prioritize one social problem and focus intervention on the specific concern when the client faces a cluster of multiple or interconnected issues. At Vatsalya, many clients struggle with physical and mental disability, discrimination, abuse, neglect, and inadequate access to healthcare services. The problems associated with diversity create barriers to autonomy, healthcare, and quality of life. For instance, the Hispanic elderly client with untreated cardiovascular disease complains about difficulties in receiving healthcare services due to the lack of insurance, as well as financial instability and social isolation due to COVID-19 restrictions. The priority should be determined between macro-level interventions necessary to address the client’s critical health issues and micro-level interventions to respond to socialization concerns.
It is crucial to clearly understand the clients’ perspectives regarding the social problems they experience. The challenge is integrating sensitivity into the intervention search and development to recognize the social issues and needs without stereotyping or relying exclusively on personal or professional experience. Diverse individuals and even people of the same age and ethnicity might have different attitudes to social problems and intervention options (Kirst-Ashman & Hull, 2018). Thus, prejudice should be avoided to provide effective personalized interventions for each client. For example, two clients with similar ethnic backgrounds, experiences, and health conditions may require different interventions to empower them and ensure their well-being. The social worker needs to employ both competence (cultural, professional) and sensitivity while working on micro-level interventions with the client and mezzo-level interventions involving the client’s family or community.
The action plan should include continuous cooperation with the client, clear identification of the top-priority problem, and development of relevant interventions. Cultural competence and an open-minded approach without stereotyping and prejudice should be the basis of successful social work practice. Partialization approach might be used to divide social problem clusters into several manageable parts and resolve them in several steps (Kirst-Ashman & Hull, 2018). Next, the problems can be ordered based on the priority identified by the client to initiate the critical intervention. Then the problems should be translated into needs to plan realistic interventions responding to these needs. Poverty and inadequate healthcare access are major social problems disproportionately affecting the senior population, especially ethnic minorities. Therefore, interdisciplinary collaboration with healthcare professionals, legislators, and legal professionals might stimulate policy changes for the benefit of the affected clients, while the promotion of state-funded/federal programs might educate the clients of available support resources.
To sum up, prioritizing a specific social problem for intervention and maintaining an open-minded and sensitive perspective free of stereotypes and prejudice might present an intervention challenge. The social worker’s action plan should be based on cooperation with the client to define priority problems, associated needs and develop relevant interventions. Interdisciplinary collaboration and awareness of state and federal initiatives might improve the clients’ support.
References
Garthwait, C. L. (2017). The social work practicum: A guide and workbook for students (7th ed.). Pearson.
Kirst-Ashman, K. K., & Hull, G. H., Jr. (2018). Understanding generalist practice (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.