Effective Social Work Practice in Adult Services: A Core Curriculum

1. Effective Social Work Practice in Adult Services: A Core Curriculum NC Division of Aging and Adult Services In collaboration with Center for Aging Research and Educational Services School of Social Work The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2. Overview • This is a three day class! • Regular breaks and lunches • We will follow the agenda (see folder) • Lots of exercises and moving around • Free spirited and honest conversations • Limited distractions. Cell phones off or muted • Have fun while learning!!!

3. Why are we talking about this? • The Department of Health and Human Services, in collaboration with our partners, protects the health and safety of all North Carolinians and provides essential human services. • We want to provide you with the tools to carry out your Mission!

4. Let’s Get set up in Teams! • Choose your captain! • Choose your reporter! • Choose your team name! Write your names on the back of your team name card

5. We Are Professionals Don’t let anybody tell you differently!

6. Blueprints for Change The goal of the core curriculum is to provide knowledge tools to ultimately help individuals bring about the change they want by assessing, setting goals, making strategies to accomplish them. Work with the individuals isn’t forever, that like the scaffolding of a building under construction or repair, you help people get what they need to make changes, but after a finite period, but the structure stands on its own.

7. Scaffolding (Support) • linking individuals to services • targeting questions to guide activity • assessing individual’s needs • actively listening • showing empathy • being nonjudgmental (aware of own values) • undertaking specific activities for the individual, for example, payee • doing research: identifying resources • helping individuals navigate the system • advocating • facilitating • helping individuals and family members communicate

8. What tools do you need? • A Model For Excellence in Adult Services Administration and Social Work Practices • A Guide to Record Keeping for Adult Services Social Workers • NASW Code of Ethics

9. A Model for Excellence in Adult Services Administration and Social Work Practice • This training is designed to assist DSS adult services social workers in understanding and integrating the concepts of A Model for Excellence in Adult Services Administration and Social Work Practice into their practice. This includes an emphasis on family-centered practice, empowerment of adults and their families, and the importance of cultural differences in work with adults and their families. Participants learn and practice basic skills in counseling, functional assessment, helping adults and their families set goals, emergency and crisis intervention, and service planning and monitoring.

10. Top Eight Expectations of Core Participants • Review basic skills for working with an individual • Get an introduction to the use of the record-keeping tools • Increase familiarity with “A Model for Excellence” • Learn the “how tos” of interviewing a individual and family for information • Get a better understanding of helping the individual and family develop their goals • Learn how to write a good goal • Learn how to conduct a useful assessment • Take good notes!

11. The Family Assessment and Change Process Resource Development and Coordination Skills Advocacy, Community Development, Case Management Clinical Skills Interviewing and Relationship Development, Crisis Intervention, Counseling Intake/ Screening (Emergency Assistance) Termination Reassessment Comprehensive Functional Assessment Support, Enable, EmpowerIndividuals and Their Families Monitoring Checklist for Change Setting Goals Planning and Initiating Services and Activities Program Area Skills Record-keeping Skills

12. Support, Enable, and Empower Individuals and Their Families

13. Support . . . • To provide basic resources directly to meet needs, typically in the form of concrete services and emotional aid for individuals and families

14. Enable • To enhance the individual’s ability to solve problems and achieve goals by providing information and access to resources, strengthening coping skills, and changing conditions that impede the individual’s progress

15. Empower(ment) • Individuals and families believe in their own abilities to manage their lives more effectively and are motivated to do independent problem solving

16. What’s a Family? • “A family is all who eat around a common table.” (Mary Richmond, 1917) • “A family is two or more people who are responsible for or receive care giving and are related either biologically, by marriage, adoption or commitment.” (Wisconsin Family Based Services Association) • “A basic social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not: the traditional family. a social unit consisting of one or more adults together with the children they care for: a single-parent family. • Family is defined as a specific group of people that may be made up of partners, children, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.

17. What’s a Family? Traditional model

18. What’s a family? “I don’t have friends, I have family - Dom” Family comes in ALL variations

19. Exercise:Creating your own family

20. Index Cards Write down and draw a picture of your family members • What would happen to your family if that member was no longer a part of it? • What important role does that family member have within your family • Would relationships change among other family members? How? • How would you feel if that person was no longer part of your family? Why is it important to understand what the individual’s family is?

21. Family-Centered Approach to Practice • To consider the “whole” individual in their total system • To acknowledge strengths as well as problems in the family system • To help us involve and support the whole family system • To provide a consistent framework for practice across the agency

22. Implications of Using a Family-Centered Approach • Social workers must be responsible for assessing both the Individual and family system • Working with the family system may increase resources for the individual • Service plans must be designed to support the caregiving efforts of the family • Service plans must emphasize preventive care to keep families from burning out and exhausting resources

23. Thumbnail Sketch of the Principles • Rationale for principles • Benefit to community • Strengths perspective • Balance of autonomy/ interdependence 5. Attitude toward families and their members: self-defining, have certain rights, can change 6.Importance of family dynamics and potential 7. Role of culture 8. Knowledge of other fields of practice 9. Accessibility 10. Basis in NASW Code of Ethics

24. Social Services: The Early Years Focused on Control and Containment

25. Key Values and Principles That Serve As the Foundation of A Person-Centered System for The Department of Health and Human Services[A person-centered system involves person-centered thinking, planning and organizations.] These guiding principles apply to the system serving all people who need long term services and supports, and their families. A person-centered system acknowledges the role of families or guardians in planning for children/youth and for adults who need assistance in making informed choices.

26. To be person-centered means: • Treating individuals and family members with dignity and respect • Helping individuals and families become empowered to set and reach their personal goals • Recognizing the right of individuals to make informed choices, and take responsibility for those choices and related risks • Building on the strengths, gifts, talents, skills, and contributions of the individual and those who know and care about the individual • Fostering community connections in which individuals can develop relationships, learn, work/produce income, actively participate in community life and achieve their full potential • Promising to listen and to act on what the individual communicates

27. To be person-centered means (con’t) • Pledging to be honest when trying to balance what is important to and important for the person • Seeking to understand individuals in the context of their age, gender, culture, ethnicity, belief system, social and income status, education, family, and any other factors that make them unique • Acknowledging and valuing families and supporting their efforts to assist family members • Recognizing and supporting mutually respectful partnerships among individuals, their families, communities, providers and professionals • Advocating for laws, rules and procedures for providing services, treatment, and supports that meet an individual’s needs and honor personal goals • Endorsing responsible use of public resources to assure that qualified individuals are served fairly and according to need

28. Exercise:Practice Principles forFamily Centered; Person Centered (Look in folder)

29. Family Centered Principles (Team flip chart) • Discuss and agree on a summary of your assigned principles • Explain briefly why the principles that your team reviewed are important • Illustrative the importance with examples from the group’s caseload Why is important to use a family–centered approach and how can you apply in in your daily work with your individuals? (discussion)

30. 7 Core Values for Social Workers • Service • Social Justice • Dignity and Worth of the Person • Importance of Human Relationships • Integrity • Competency (NASW Code of Ethics)

31. What is Ethics? A simple definition

32. Doing the Right Thing when Nobody is looking

33. Code of EthicsNational Association of Social Workers The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. A historic and defining feature of social work is the profession’s focus on individual well-being in a social context and the well-being of society. Fundamental to social work is attention to the environmental forces that create, contribute to, and address problems in living.

34. Code of EthicsNational Association of Social Workers Social workers promote social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients. “Clients” is used inclusively to refer to individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. Social workers are sensitive to cultural and ethnic diversity and strive to end discrimination, oppression, poverty, and other forms of social injustice. These activities may be in the form of direct practice, community organizing, supervision, consultation administration, advocacy, social and political action, policy development and implementation, education, and research and evaluation. Social workers seek to enhance the capacity of people to address their own needs. Social workers also seek to promote the responsiveness of organizations, communities, and other social institutions to individuals’ needs and social problems.

35. Legal Duties of Social Workers • Care • Respect Privacy • Maintain Confidentiality • Inform • Report • Warn

36. Legal Responsibilities Duty of Care • “Reasonable Standard of Care” • You must be available to individuals you serve • Educate individuals on whom to contact and what to do in case of an emergency • Before going on vacation, notify individuals and ensure substitute professional coverage • Record keeping in a timely manner Duty to Respect Privacy • Includes physical space • Individual’s aspects of personal life Symbolic region (person’s alone to share or reveal as he or she sees fit)

37. Legal Responsibilities Duty to Maintain Confidentiality • Confidentiality: professional norm that information shared by or pertaining to individuals will not be shared with third parties • Privilege - refers to the disclosure of confidential information in court proceedings (even higher standard of confidentiality) Duty to Inform • Informing individuals of the nature and extent of the services you and your agency offer. Duty to Report • To report to designated governmental authorities indications of certain “outrages against humanity”

38. Legal Responsibilities (continued) Duty to Warn • If a individual reveals an intent to harm another person and you determine that the individual might act upon that intent in such a way as to endanger another person, then you must: • 1) Try to arrange for protective supervision of the individual • 2) Warn the intended victim or victims of the threat • 3) Notify legal authorities of this danger

39. The Family Assessment and Change Process Resource Development and Coordination Skills Advocacy, Community Development, Case Management Clinical Skills Interviewing and Relationship Development, Crisis Intervention, Counseling Intake/ Screening (Emergency Assistance) Termination Comprehensive Functional Assessment Reassessment Support, Enable, EmpowerIndividuals and Their Families Monitoring Checklist for Change Setting Goals Planning and Initiating Services and Activities Program Area Skills Record-keeping Skills

40. Definition of Counseling • Counseling is purposeful communication with individuals in the context of respectful, genuine, and empathic relationships.

41. Goal of Counseling • The goal of counseling is to empower individuals by helping them find ways to change thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that interfere with their ability to cope or to use resources in ways that would enable them to function effectively.

42. Counseling (continued) Adult services social workers use a functional approach to counseling, focusing on problems that will be identified during the assessment as being internal to the individual or the individual’s family system. The service plan specifies counseling as the appropriate intervention to address identified functional problems related to the individual or family’s use of internal resources. For the most part, counseling in county department of social services is not focused on changing a individual’s personality in the way that therapeutic counseling would be. Rather, its purpose is to collaborate with individual in the short term to make changes in specific attitudes, emotions, and actions that might interfere with their use of services, prevent them from obtaining support from others, or block their ability to cope independently

43. What skills should you demonstrate as a counselor? • Get individuals to think about things, solve problems (engagement) • Encouraging individuals to communicate • Listening for things beyond just the words, empathic listening (feeling, content) • Reflecting what individuals say • Purposeful conversations with individuals—always a goal in mind • Redirection: get conversation onto purposeful direction • Helping people weigh choices about what to do—information brokering • Validation and encouragement

44. What skills should you demonstrate as a counselor? • Good listener • Shows genuine concern • Asks about individual’s concerns • Has a nice voice, pleasant personality • Normalizes the experience • Knowledgeable about services • Good at hearing what isn’t being said • Focused • Conveys verbal and nonverbal messages about respect • Respects people’s time • Maintains appropriate eye contact, good facial expression

45. Exercise:“Never Tell”

46. Think about some piece of information about your self that you never told and find it hard to share with anyone else (Don’t say it!!!)Write it down, but don’t show anybody Discuss with your your team: • How did you feel when you thought you had to tell your secret? • What could your partner/team have done to make you feel more comfortable if you were going to share your secret? • What does this exercise have to do with your practice with individuals? • How can you use what you have learned here to make it easier for individuals to tell you things?

47. Setting Boundaries – Mrs. Casey(Team flip Chart) Read Mrs. Casey’s narrative • Identify the areas that you think the social worker has crossed the professional boundary that she should maintain with the individual? • What might be the impact of these boundary issues? Does anyone have a method which reminds them to ensure appropriate boundaries are set with an individual?

48. Communication Why is it important how we communicate?

49. Communicating your attention nonverbally SOLER Sit up and slant Open your posture Lean in Eye contact (make it!) Relax your position

50. Empathic Listening • Empathic listening is hearingboth the content and the feelingsthat an individual communicates and reflecting that perception to the individual so that they feel understood.