Hospital Social Work

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Social Work is the type of profession where you connect and work with different people that have different fields and backgrounds. It is also a profession where you can work in a variety of different places and organziations, such as hospitals. There is a range of different studies and journal articles surrounding the topic of Social Workers in multidisciplinary teams, and we are going to examine and explore these literatures in regards to the roles, tasks and responsibilities of social workers in a multidisciplinary team in hospital settings. This literature review will also examine the differing views of service users, medical staff and social workers on the social work roles in hospital settings and their value. According to Aotearoa New …show more content…

Social workers working in health care have been established for 100 years or more (Cleak & Turczynski, 2014). Hospital social workers help and support patients, families and carers with the consequences and impacts of disability or illnesses (MacLaughlin, 2015). Hospital social workers do this by providing support, advice and information during their stay at the hospital (MacLaughlin, 2015). According to a range of different research studies, it has been found that there is a long history of social work in hospitals (Beddoe & Deeney, 2012; MacLaughlin, 2015; Giles, 2016; Cleak & Turczynski, 2014). According to a review of international health social work in the past 100 years conducted by Auslander (2001), most hospitals around the world had a shift away from the biomedical perspective or the ‘disease’ paradigm to the social model of health, which takes into account the spiritual, social, cultural, psychological and ecological factors that can have huge influences to a person’s life. A biopsychosocial model has also been adopted (Beddoe & Deeney, 2012). This model sees illness as an interaction between the environment and the cultural, physical, psychosocial, social and behavioural factors which can impact and affect a person’s health (Beddoe & Deeney, 2012). These shifts in views, models and perspectives had a massive influence on social work roles and responsibilities in hospital

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