NASW’s Supervisory Leaders in Aging: An Acceptable and Feasible Model for Training and Supporting Social Work Supervisors

Social services are instrumental in addressing challenges associated with aging. Yet, practitioners report needing expanded gerontological knowledge and better supervision. The Supervisory Leaders in Aging (SLA) program of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) was designed to improve gerontological services by strengthening supervision of the social service workforce. With support from the John A. Hartford Foundation, the program was adopted between 2015 and 2017 in four regions, where NASW trained 134 MSW supervisors who support 1200 social service staff, potentially enhancing the well-being of 264,000 clients annually. The SLA curriculum and in-person educational approach constitute a model for supervisor professional development. Quality improvement evaluations suggested feasibility of program adoption and acceptability. Participants rated each of 10 workshops and 97% agreed that instructors were effective, that knowledge was expanded, and that content was relevant, appropriate, and likely to be used. Implications of this model for enhancing supervisory practice are discussed.     

Dysfunctional grieving.

Dysfunctional grieving represents a failure to follow the predictable course of normal grieving to resolution (Lindemann, 1944). When the process deviates from the norm, the individual becomes overwhelmed and resorts to maladaptive coping. The process implies movement toward assimilation to or accommodation of the loss, resulting in progression toward social, psychological, and medical morbidity. Nurses will better assess the needs of the client with adequate information about the client's recent losses and perception of those losses. Such an assessment, in conjunction with an understanding of the signs, symptoms, and predisposing factors of complicated bereavement, will enable the nurse to develop a plan of effective intervention. Both case examples illustrate unresolved grief. In Case Example 1, the patient denied the importance of the relationship, which became masked with displaced anger and therefore delayed the grieving process. In Case Example 2, the patient's attempts at grieving over the loss of her son were complicated by her long-standing struggle with her husband's infidelity at the time of her pregnancy. The revelation of secondary loss is common in dysfunctional grieving. Resolution of grief encompasses not only accommodation to object loss, but also change in the pathological behaviors incorporated into the patient's self-image as a result of the loss (Lazare, 1979). The maladaptive operations employed by these patients to preserve self-image were discarded as the grief resolved. The focus of therapy included the loss of those behaviors as they were relinquished to prevent the patient from experiencing further anxiety and sense of loss (Zisook, 1987).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Gender and Sexuality in Discourses of Managerial Control: The Case of Women Miners

Mining scholarship has focused chiefly on capital developments, labour relations, changing technology, and global markets, ignoring the equally critical aspects of gendered organizations and their role in shaping the subjectivities of workers and managers. This article probes how gender and sexuality organize a mine site through organizational design and productivity management. It looks behind the rhetoric of equal opportunity, glamour mining and human resource techniques to explore the sexual politics of employing women as miners. In particular it scrutinizes the discourses of masculinity that produce ‘the woman miner’ in a context where the barriers between work and personal life are particularly mobile and highly contested. Equally crucially, it recounts some of the ways in which women have mobilized against systemic male dominance and privilege. The workplace in question is the world’s largest gem mine of its kind, a state–of–the–art computerized operation set in the remote Australian outback.     

High school after school: creating pathways to the future for adolescents

This article proposes a strategy for the use of out-of-school time for adolescents, illustrates this strategy in action in Chicago, and discusses the challenges it faces.     

Intimacy boundaries: between mental health nurses & psychiatric patients

This was the first research study in Canada to explore intimacy boundary violations and sexual misconduct between nurses (both RNs and registered psychiatric nurses) and patients. Using a researcher-generated survey, a total of 923 mental health nurses commented on their sexual attraction to patients, and dating and sexual intercourse patterns with patients. The findings indicated that very few nurses had dated or engaged in sexual intercourse with discharged patients, and the few nurses who had done so tended to be younger men prepared at the registered psychiatric nursing diploma level. A small number of nurses believed it was permissible to have a sexual relationship with a patient while the patient was hospitalized, but none reported having a current relationship. Given the severity of this intimacy boundary violation, nurses need to be educated regarding the serious and dangerous psychiatric effects that can result for patients from engaging in a sexual relationship with nurses. The Code of Ethics of the Canadian Nurses Association and nurses' obligation to follow it needs to be reinforced. Nurses engaging in intimacy boundary violations are vulnerable to patient-initiated lawsuits.     

The Public Policy of Motherhood

Parents seeking to balance their work lives with family responsibilities often find the challenge made more difficult by outdated images of the ideal worker, the good mother, and the good father. Social and legal constraints on mothers' choices exacerbate the problem. While other countries have implemented national work/family policies, the climate in the United States seems unreceptive to federal government mandates for meaningful changes in employees' work hours, schedules, and paid leave, or for sweeping new child care subsidies. As a viable interim measure, we propose a statute forbidding discrimination based on family responsibilities, which would tap deeply-felt values about the importance of family caregiving, serve as an important symbolic statement, and be useful to courts.     

Comprehensive model for child services: Parent education follow through program

One program which provides comprehensive child and family services is the Parent Education Follow Through Program. Developed at the University of Florida in 1968 by Dr. Ira J. Gordon and moved to the University of North Carolina in 1977, this program is currently implemented in ten diverse communities across the nation, both rural and urban. Using a theoretical ecological framework, the program focuses on the relationship between the home and the school with attention also given to other systems present in the community as well as at the state and national levels. The major features of the program include the following: (1) comprehensive services (social, psychological, and medical); (2) weekly home visitations by paid paraprofessionals during which home learning activities stressing specific parental teaching behaviors are delivered; and (3) parental participation of various kinds including volunteer, employee and decision-maker. The data that have been collected to measure these program areas have shown that the model has had a positive impact upon children's achievement as well as upon their families, the school, and the community.     

Autonomy and Monitoring on Hospital Wards

This paper describes the systems of relationships and manner of operation of several hospital wards. Data from these settings suggest three concepts of understanding the behavior of the participants. One is elastic autonomy: the autonomy of an actor is not fixed, but expands and contracts according to others' assessments of his professional competence. The second is accountability: an actor is held to be accountable or responsible for his decisions and actions. Third is monitoring: the process by which actors keep track of each other's performance. Contingencies affecting autonomy are discussed, as are the relationships between these concepts and those of bureaucratic theory.     

Marital Therapy: Toleration of Differentness

This paper presents a way of understanding marriage and marital therapy in terms of Satir's concept of differentness. One important impetus toward marriage is the individual's need to feel complete through emotional fusion with the spouse. Individuals choose marriage partners who will give them a sense of completion. Marital balance is sought around the fulcrum of this need for unity. Any disturbance to the myth of unity of the two partners is seen as a personal threat by each. Marital balance or homeostatis is a way the partners disguise the unique differentness of each. Acknowledgement of the differentness and separateness of the other is seen as a threat to the self. The task of therapy is to help partners recognize and tolerate the differentness of the other.