Social Work Reflection Essay
For this assignment you need to focus on reflective learning you have acquired whilst undertaking this module with respect to a specific situation incident or scenario in your home/residence or town. This could be an agency, workplace setting or in community which involved risk to a key vulnerable/marginalized person. Based on this learning what kind of questions, processes, investigations would you have made? With the benefit of hindsight would you have done anything differently? The following are some guidelines.
- Briefly outline the situation/incident
- Clearly identify your own professional role as a social worker or as a external commentator you were not directly involved in the situation but are critically observing the dynamics and responses as an independent third party.
- Clearly identify all key players/stakeholders in the situation/incident/scenario
- Clear identification of the risks/vulnerability in the situation/incident/scenario.
- Risk conceptualization: Discussion of how you understand the idea of risk and how risks is understood by stakeholders
Reflective learning helps learners understand classroom concepts effectively, as critical thinking and analysis of personal experiences are involved in the learning process. Social workers are supposed to improve the well-being of the people in the community by offering the needed support and care to the vulnerable in society (Daley & Feit, 2013). The experiences social workers go through provide opportunities for learning, self-reflecting, and correcting previous mistakes. Analyzing experiences enables social workers to improve future performances, which translates to effective care to the vulnerable in society.
This scenario that happened in Brooklyn, New York will help me reflect on what I could have done if faced with the same scenario. Rehabilitation centers in Brooklyn have social workers to ensure that patients receive the best services which help in the recovery process. A young man struggling with cocaine addiction was placed in a rehabilitation facility to smoothen the recovery process. The young man’s mother was also a cocaine addict, but she was imprisoned for drug-related charges. The young man had not experienced motherly love, and he always confessed to social workers that he could pay any price to experience that love. The young man’s support system was his aunt, and the moment he was to be discharged from the facility, her aunt was the one to accommodate her and ensure that he does not relapse. The young man was determined to recover from the cocaine addiction and worked hard by following all the given instructions. The young man’s mother served her sentence and she was released from prison. The only living relative she knew was her sister, who offered to accommodate her. Social workers at the rehabilitation facilities recommended that the young man was ready to be discharged and her aunt picked him up. The following month, the young man relapsed and died as a result of overdosing.
My professional role as a social worker should always guide me in the decision-making process. Professional workers support and improve the lives of vulnerable people in society. The vulnerable people in society include drug and substance abuse addicts, children, people living with disabilities, and mentally challenged individuals. In the scenario, the social workers supported people in the rehabilitation centers to improve the lives of the drug addicts. People are discharged from the facility, and that is a clear indication that the social workers are performing the assigned roles effectively. Another role of social workers is to conduct an assessment and connect the vulnerable people in society to the needed resources (Marc, Makai-Dimeny, & Oşvat, 2014). As a social worker, I am obligated to research and assess what the vulnerable in society need in order to improve the outcomes in people’s lives. The assessment also involves determining what resources the needy people in society need to turn their lives around.
Social work roles also involve identifying people in need of help in society. The available resources should be allocated to vulnerable people who have no alternative source of help. This helps in ensuring that the most vulnerable people in society are helped. In our scenario, the young man was addicted to cocaine and needed help. The social workers in the facility helped the young man until he was discharged. Another role of social workers is advocacy. As a social worker, I am supposed to advocate for the rights of the vulnerable in society (Darnell, 2013). The advocacy involves creating awareness that will help the vulnerable groups in the community not to be stigmatized. The advocacy role also involves educating people in society on how to take care of needy people. People also need to be educated on ways of seeking help whenever one is faced with challenges. The other role is following up with vulnerable people to ensure that the situation has improved and minimized chances of relapse.
I have gained adequate information from the scenario, and I could have done something different. The first action I would have taken is to conduct an assessment of the home, which was to help the young man recover. The assessment would have helped me to realize the presence of the young man’s mother would worsen the recovery process. The young man’s mother would have been admitted to a rehabilitation facility before discharging the young man and the action could have helped to save a life. Another action that I could have taken as a qualified social worker is following up with my patient to ensure that chances of relapses were minimal (Marc, Makai-Dimeny, & Oşvat, 2014). Following up on the young man’s progress would have helped me to ensure that the young man was not living in an environment that cannot aid his recovery process, and necessary actions would have been taken.
The key players in the scenario include the young man, social worker, young man’s aunt, and young man’s mother. The key players in the scenario face different risks as their situations are different. The young man faces the risk of poor health as chances of relapse are quite high. The young man was living in an environment where there were chances of drug availability from his mother. The young man’s mother faces the risk of poor health and drug addiction. The lady was from prison and not from a rehabilitation center, so the chances of picking where she left were quite high. The young man’s aunt also faced the risk of her children being exposed to drugs as two people with drug and substance abuse addiction were living in her house. The social worker in the scenario also faces the risk of losing their practicing license for not conducting a need assessment for the young man (Tai, & Volkow, 2013). The social worker is obligated to ensure that recovering individuals discharged from the rehabilitation center are placed in a safe environment to aid in the recovery process. The social worker also did not follow up with the young man to ensure that his welfare was improving, and the actions amount to a lack of due care and negligence, which are substantial grounds for losing a practicing license. The social worker also faces the risk of moral injury, which occurs from the guilt of no performing duties effectively.
Risk is a chance taken during the decision-making process that can yield beneficial or harmful outcomes. Risks concerning human health should be guided by policies and procedures in the organization as judgemental risk could be quite harmful to the patients. The risk of relapse in this scenario was underestimated by the stakeholders. The young man was blinded by motherly love and did not consider that living with his mother was exposing him to drug addiction risk. The social worker did not conduct an assessment of the home accommodating the young man and that increased the chances of relapse (Lander, Howsare, & Byrne, 2013). The young man’s aunt hosting two people with a history of drug abuse did not consider that she was exposing her own family to drug addiction as chances of drug availability in the environment were high.
References
- Daley, D. C., & Feit, M. D. (2013). The many roles of social workers in the prevention and treatment of alcohol and drug addiction: A major health and social problem affecting individuals, families, and society. Social work in public health, 28(3-4), 159-164.
- Darnell, J. S. (2013). Navigators and assisters: two case management roles for social workers in the Affordable Care Act. Health & social work, 38(2), 123-126.
- Lander, L., Howsare, J., & Byrne, M. (2013). The impact of substance use disorders on families and children: from theory to practice. Social work in public health, 28(3-4), 194-205.
- Marc, C., Makai-Dimeny, J., & Oşvat, C. (2014). The social work supervisor: Skills, roles, responsibilities. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov Series VII: Social Sciences, Law, 7(56), 221-230.
- Tai, B., & Volkow, N. D. (2013). Treatment for substance use disorder: Opportunities and challenges under the Affordable Care Act. Social work in public health, 28(3-4), 165-174.