Social work and interprofessional education: integration,intersectionality, and institutional leadership

Over the last decade healthcare policies and practices in the US have placed significant emphasis on healthcare integration, mental health parity, and implementation of team-based practice models to improve quality, safety, and affordability of service. With these incentives in mind, schools of social work have joined with national and international health education organizations to reduce disciplinary silos and increase shared learning opportunities across professions and programs. The social work profession has long supported collaborative practice however, students are rarely paired with others in the classroom or intentionally taught about counterparts’ roles and expertise. Social work leaders are also responsible for addressing the intersectionality between collaborative competencies and sociocultural factors. The 2015 EPAS and 2016 Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice create multi-level opportunities for social work educators to provide Interprofessional Education (IPE) innovation and leadership across common curricula and educational settings. The authors examine historic challenges to integrating IPE in social work curricula, provide three examples of IPE/social work initiatives in higher education, describe the intersectionality of the EPAS and the IPEC competencies, and identify institutional benefits associated with the integration of IPE in schools of social work culture and curriculum.     

A New Approach to the Study of Tolerance: Conceptualizing and Measuring Acceptance,Respect, and Appreciation of Difference

Previous empirical research on tolerance suffers from a number of shortcomings, the most serious being the conceptual and operational conflation of (in)tolerance and prejudice. We design research to remedy this. First, we contribute to the literature by advancing research that distinguishes analytically between the two phenomena. We conceptualize tolerance as a value orientation towards difference. This definition—which is abstract and does not capture attitudes towards specific out-groups, ideas, or behaviors—allows for the analysis of tolerance within and between societies. Second, we improve the measurement of tolerance by developing survey items that are consistent with this conceptualization. We administer two surveys, one national (Sweden) and one cross-national (Australia, Denmark, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States). Results from structural equation models show that tolerance is best understood as a three-dimensional concept, which includes acceptance of, respect for, and appreciation of difference. Analyses show that measures of tolerance have metric invariance across countries, and additional tests demonstrate convergent and discriminant validity. We also assess tolerance’s relationship to prejudice and find that only an appreciation of difference has the potential to reduce prejudice. We conclude that it is not only possible to measure tolerance in a way that is distinct from prejudice but also necessary if we are to understand the causes and consequences of tolerance.

     

Children's Experience of Sport: What Do We Really Know?

Internationally, children's participation in leisure activities, including sport, is considered to be of such importance that it is enshrined as a human right. However, there is a growing awareness that children's experience of sport is not always benign; abuse and harm frequently occur within a broad range of organised sport contexts. This systematic literature review examines the international research evidence from both peer reviewed and grey literature on the abuse and harm of children that can occur in sport. Four areas of focus were apparent in this literature: first, types of abuse encountered by children in sport and the harm caused to them; second, persons responsible for the abuse and harm; third, circumstances under which children may be most vulnerable; and fourth, the role that culture plays in facilitating abuse in sport. The paper concludes identifying the need for further research in this domain.     

Integrated care workforce development: university-community collaboration

ABSTRACT

Behavioral health workforce shortages to provide quality care services for children, adolescents, and transitional age youth are well established. This paper highlights the workforce shortage and the need to infuse interprofessional education to engage in integrated care for children, adolescents and transitional age youth with behavioral health needs. A specialized training curriculum to build behavioral health workforce in Nevada was conceptualized and delivered through 10 workshops under the auspices of the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) funded Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) grant funded in 2014. To train existing workforce and in alignment with the spirit of the grant to build behavioral health workforce and existing workforce, workshops were extended to social service providers in the community. In an effort to enhance university-community collaboration, workshop presenters were invited from various units in the University and from social service agencies in the community. Implications of such training are addressed from a policy, practice, research, and university-community collaboration perspective.     

Work and Family in the Second Decade of the 21st Century

In the second decade of the 21st century, research on work and family from multiple disciplines flourished. The goal of this review is to capture the scope of this work–family literature and to highlight both the valuable advances and problematic omissions. In synthesizing this literature, the authors show that numerous scholars conducted studies and refined theories that addressed gender, but far fewer examined racial and class heterogeneity. They argue that examining heterogeneity changes the understanding of work–family relations. After briefly introducing the broad social, political, and economic context in which diverse work–family connections developed, this review uses this context to address the following three main themes, each with subtopics: (a) unpaid work including housework, parenting as work, and kin work; (b) paid work including work timing and hours, money (i.e., motherhood penalty, fatherhood bonus, marriage bonus, kin care penalty), relationships (i.e., coworkers, supervisors), and work experiences (i.e., complexity, autonomy, urgency); and (c) work–family policies (i.e., scheduling and child care). Given the breadth of the work–family literature, this review is not exhaustive but, rather, the authors synthesize key findings on each topic followed by a critique, especially with regard to the analyses of differences and inequalities around gender, race, ethnicity, and social class.     

Creating the Final Conversations Scale: A Measure of End-of-Life Relational Communication with Terminally Ill Individuals

Final conversations (FCs) are defined as the communicative interactions, both verbal and nonverbal, that occur between terminally ill patients and relational partners. In this study, the “Final Conversations Scale” was developed and tested. A total of 152 participants that had engaged in final conversations with individuals that were terminally ill completed the newly developed instrument. Factor analysis produced a five-factor structure, including: messages of spirituality/religion; expressions of love; proactive difficult relationship talk; everyday communication; and talk about illness/death. Participants' perceptions of the relational closeness and difficulty with the deceased significantly influenced the individuals' recalled frequency of FCs messages. Practical and scholarly implications focus on the needs of the family members regarding their communication with terminally ill individuals, as well as directions for future research with the FCs Scale.