6 Mar, 2024

Ask Nicole: The Role of Social Workers in Reproductive Justice

By |2024-03-07T11:09:44-05:00March 6th, 2024|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , , |0 Comments

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March is Social Work Month, and the 2024 theme is “Empowering Social Workers!: Inspiring Action, Leading Change.”

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that my passion area is Reproductive Justice, and how the framework looks through a social work lens.

Reproductive Justice and social work are very complimentary. As RJ is a community organizing model that centers community leadership and challenges structural inequities, the framework provides a holistic understanding of our circumstances, and how they help or hinder our sexual and reproductive decision making. Social work supports individual and collective capacity for social functioning, working to create societal conditions that support communities in need. Together, they acknowledge that we seldom make life decisions in a vacuum. Social, economic, racial, gender, and cultural dynamics impact what we have access to and how we make decisions to support our sexual and reproductive care.

Reproductive Justice stands at the intersection of social work practice and human rights. As social workers navigate our roles in advancing RJ, we’ll encounter multifaceted challenges and opportunities across micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. Consider these questions as you navigate your social work education and career to advance Reproductive Justice:

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1 Mar, 2023

Ask Nicole: What is a Public Health Social Worker?

By |2023-03-01T12:27:07-05:00March 1st, 2023|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , , |0 Comments

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There are two things I know for sure about social work and public health:

One: Social work and public health are naturally complimentary fields, perfectly suited to advance community health and wellbeing.

Two: People are just as confused about what public health is as they are with social work.

A struggle with social work is, because the profession is so diverse, most have a narrow view of what social workers do. While most only associate social work with social services, social workers work in many different settings, including schools, hospitals and clinics mental health practices, veteran centers, child welfare agencies, the criminal justice system, corporations, academia, research and policy, and state, federal and local government.

Similar to social work, public health practitioners work in various settings like the one’s I’ve mentioned. Also similar to social work, the general public is unclear about what public health is, what practitioners do, and how public health adds value. This disconnect limits communities’ understanding of what’s required to do social work and public health work effectively.

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1 Feb, 2023

Ask Nicole: I’m Uncomfortable Working with Certain Clients

By |2023-02-01T12:23:36-05:00February 1st, 2023|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments

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In the early years of my social work career, I had a large caseload of individuals from various backgrounds and needs.

Some clients were more challenging to work with than others, but I’d say I got along well with everyone I worked with.

Yet sometimes, I didn’t click with every person I worked with. However, these experiences were easier to navigate when I made the decision to focus on the client’s needs as opposed to my personal feelings towards them.

There were moments, however, where I was uncomfortable working with certain clients. Mainly male clients who disclosed (either in sessions with me or in their intake assessment with another colleague) their history of violence towards women.

I shared my feelings during supervision one day, only for my supervisor to share this with another colleague. Needless to say, this didn’t help matters. I was looking for guidance on working with clients that, based on experiences that had nothing to do with me, I didn’t want to work with due to my own personal values.

These days, I have more control over who I work with, but I want to provide some insights I learned during that time that may be useful. While you don’t have to like a client to do your job as a social worker, it’s harder to do a good job when you actively dislike them.

In your personal life, you’re more likely to go above and beyond for someone you like. It’s harder to do this for someone you don’t like.

In a professional setting, you can’t really get away with this. Sometimes, these relationships improve over time, but when you find yourself not wanting to work with a client, here’s some guidance:

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3 Nov, 2021

Ask Nicole: Using Social Work Skills as a Consultant

By |2021-11-03T12:27:51-04:00November 3rd, 2021|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , , |0 Comments

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A few months ago, I mentioned that I’ll be limiting the content I create around starting and running a consulting practice.

But I had a conversation with social work colleague recently that I couldn’t want to share! So, this month’s Ask Nicole is about consulting, but from the context of social work.

My colleague asked how I’ve used my social work skills as a consultant. In hindsight, my transition from full time direct services social work to full time consulting was pretty seamless, due in part to how my time was structured.

There’s more than one way to be a social worker. This is important, particularly if you’re either social work student, a social worker new to the field, or a seasoned professional looking for something different.

Likewise, most social workers start out at the micro level, working directly with individuals, children, and families. An opportunity can arise where you can serve in a supervisory or leadership role, moving from micro social work into mezzo and macro social work, but the clinical social work skills you learned in school will always be applicable regardless of your role as a social worker.

Here’s how my old process for engaging direct services clients influences how I currently engage with consulting clients.

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7 Aug, 2019

Ask Nicole: Dealing with the Death of a Client

By |2021-08-19T20:43:26-04:00August 7th, 2019|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , |0 Comments

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During the first year of my social work graduate program, I interned at a comprehensive care clinic at a New York City-area hospital. The primary population at the time was adults living with HIV and AIDS. The social work team was small- only four social workers on the team- and I shared a caseload with my field placement supervisor. The social workers would see clients at the clinic but also rotate to the inpatient floor of the hospital, so whenever it was my supervisor’s time to go to inpatient, I’d tag along.

One day, she asked for me to do a quick intake assessment for one of her clients who had been admitted on the inpatient floor. He was a middle-aged man with the initials “PM”, who was very pleasant and invited me to have a seat in one of the chairs in his room. One of the questions was confirming his AIDS status. He confirmed it, but quickly told me that no one else knew of his diagnosis, including his family.

I saw PM a few months later back in inpatient. This time, he looked completely different. He’d lost a lot of weight and his face was sunken. He was very weak, and couldn’t speak. In his room, I was met by his brother who seemed agitated because he wasn’t informed why his brother had been admitted. Before seeing PM, I looked at his clinic chart to discover that he’d been diagnosed with Epidemic (AIDS-associated) Kaposi sarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer. While asking questions from the intake assessment (after his brother stepped out of the room), PM answered with paper and pen. Before leaving, I asked PM if there’s anything he wanted me to tell my supervisor. He asked about the likelihood of him being discharged to go home.

A week later, I received a notification in the staff’s client appointment system that PM had died. I looked in his chart again to see an updated medical note from his clinic medical provider. The provider had recommended to PM’s brother and mother that PM should be discharged for hospice care. When asked why, the provider had to disclose PM’s AIDS status to his family.

Soon after PM’s death, my supervisor and I went back to inpatient, this time as witnesses for a young woman signing legal documentation to assign custody of her young sons to a relative. She died soon after. My supervisor asked if I wanted to debrief with her about PM’s and the young woman’s deaths, and I remember telling her that I was fine but would speak to her about it if I needed to.

I went from experiencing these deaths as a student to experiencing the deaths of several clients while working at my old agency after graduating. One client died by suicide, one was found dead in her apartment under suspicious circumstances but was later determined to be health related, one died via a drug overdose, and there are others who died but so much time as passed that I can’t remember their causes of death. On top of this, my staff would get routine emails informing us of clients who have died in other departments, along with the deaths of some staff members.

But the death that impacted me most was “LB”. He was middle-aged man whom I’d met around 2 years after joining my agency. When my supervisor introduced me to him in his office, LB was sitting across from my supervisor’s desk, crying as he wanted to sign up for services plus being spooked that he’d had 3 heart attacks in that month alone.

LB quickly became one of my favorite clients, where I’d do frequent home visits with him and I managed to get him a receptionist job at the agency location. The last time I saw LB was in April 2015 when he stopped by to see me for an update on a medical visit he’d just left. After that, all of my calls and letters either went unanswered or returned to sender. I managed to get in contact with LB’s mother that August, where she disclosed that LB died earlier in May from a heart attack. I told my supervisor and gave her his case closure documentation, and went about the rest of my day. When I got home, I sat on my bed and cried.

At the time, I thought I cried specifically for LB. In hindsight, I cried not only LB, but all the clients that died before him. I never fully gave myself the space to process each death (particularly the deaths that occurred when I was a student) and I think in some ways I’d become desensitized to hearing about the deaths as I transitioned from student to professional.

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