Hospice Social Work

The first text to explore the history, characteristics, and challenges of hospice social work, this volume weaves leading research into an underlying framework for practice and care. A longtime practitioner, Dona J. Reese describes the hospice social work role in assessment and intervention with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and the community, while honestly confronting the personal and professional difficulties of such life-changing work. She introduces a well-tested model of psychosocial and spiritual variables that predict hospice client outcomes, and she advances a social work assessment tool to document their occurrence. Operating at the center of national leaders' coordinated efforts to develop and advance professional organizations and guidelines for end-of-life care, Reese reaches out with support and practice information, helping social workers understand their significance in treating the whole person, contributing to the cultural competence of hospice settings, and claiming a definitive place within the hospice team.

Hospice social work is a complex and specialized branch of the medical field. Social workers in this area have unique skills, roles, and techniques that are often overlooked or underestimated. This book is a celebration and an educational opportunity for those interested in Hospice social work. It is a lighthearted, realistic, and a personal account of techniques, experiences, and opportunities for growth in this specialized profession. This book gives a realistic, yet lighthearted look at the vast and unexpected turns this work can take, and along the way shows the growth and lessons the author has experienced in her years of working in this field. Her tips, suggestions and techniques are down to earth and easy to understand, and you will find them helpful not only in the Hospice field, but in your personal life as well. The information shared in this book is heartwarming and easy to apply, and something you will not want to put down!

Spirituality and Hospice Social Work helps practitioners understand various forms of spiritual assessment for use with their clients. The book teaches practitioners to recognize a client's spiritual needs and resources, as well as signs of spiritual suffering.

The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Social Work is a comprehensive, evidence-informed text that addresses the needs of professionals who provide interdisciplinary, culturally sensitive, biopsychosocial-spiritual care for patients and families living with life-threatening illness. Social workers from diverse settings will benefit from its international scope and wealth of patient and family narratives. Unique to this scholarly text is its emphasis on the collaborative nature inherent in palliative care. This definitive resource is edited by two leading palliative social work pioneers who bring together an array of international authors who provide clinicians, researchers, policy-makers, and academics with a broad range of content to enrich the guidelines recommended by the National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care.

Accessible and instructive, Palliative Care guides and inspires health social workers to integrate palliative care principles into their current clinical practice. Through the lenses of environmental theory and intersectionality, rich case narratives and diverse practice settings highlightopportunities for social workers to enhance their work, thereby advancing whole-person care in the face of serious illness. The volume also models engagement, assessment, and intervention through key palliative care skills and language. Chapters include questions to concretize ideas and demonstratereal-world application, while case narratives cover a range of settings, diagnoses, and populations. This book is a useful tool for any social worker working with individuals and families navigating complex health care systems.

This unique book provides a rare look at social work and palliative care from the perspective of service users. Drawing on new original research, the authors examine service users' experiences, tracking their journeys through it, exploring the care they receive and the effects of culture and difference through their first hand comments and ideas.

This book provides an introduction to social work practice in the field of health care. It addresses both physical and mental health, examines various settings such as primary care, home care, hospice, and nursing, and also provides histories of social work practice in traditional industry segments.

This book draws together the learning of a wide range of social workers and other professionals engaged in end of life care who recognise that dying is essentially a social experience and want to tailor a personal, professional and societal response accordingly. Through a systemic lens, the book explores the nature and experience of living and dying in the UK today, then considers ways in which social workers and others may want to work with people who are affected by a diagnosis of a life-threatening condition. The contributors offer rich and contemporary perspectives on death, dying and loss, reflective of their different approaches and interests. The insights of the book are timely, given the growing levels and changing nature of needs for people who are coming to the end of their life in the UK and beyond, and the related requirements for compassionate, personalised and holistic care within the increasingly professionalised arena of health and social care. This book will be of interest to social work practitioners, students, and others committed to psychosocial support of people who are dying or bereaved, and who want to consider how to provide this support most effectively. Professionals who are interested in working alongside social workers to deliver high quality end of life care will also find this publication useful. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.