One of my most memorable rotations during medical school was a month-long pairing with a late-career general practitioner. He had been using the traditional written...
Social Work Month in March is a time to celebrate the great profession of social work. The theme in 2021 is Social Workers Are Essential. Social workers are essential to community well-being. As practitioners, social workers are trained to help people address personal and systemic barriers to optimal living. They are employed to effect positive change with individuals, families, groups and entire communities.
But what tools do social workers have in their toolkit to do this job well? The best social work platforms include client tracking tools to see where people are in the health and social care system, longitudinal shared plans of care to keep all members of the care team centered around the needs and goals of their clients, and real-time alerts and notifications of critical information. When social work programs purchase software systems that deliver these tools to social workers in the field, everybody wins.
Here are seven tools that social workers rely on in the Activate Care platform:
- Shared plans of care for social work
- Tools for social work referrals in the community
- Social work alerts and notifications
- Patient access to social work records
- Social work case management tools
- Tools to track social work goals
- Support for authentic healing relationships
Social workers are key players in their clients’ digital plans of care.
Shared care plans are the living documents inside Activate Care where you can understand at a glance what is happening in your client’s life and access the longitudinal history and context of their current situation. This is where social workers can see and contribute to a client’s goals, tasks, and case notes in one place.
Social workers rely on connections to partners in the community.
The role of a social worker involves collaborating with different organizations in your community on a daily basis. The Activate Care platform provides an easy way to do this, allowing for robust community access and for care teams to connect and communicate, which all contributes to improved care for the client.
Customized alerts help social workers react to changes in their clients’ lives.
Staying up-to-date with each client’s situation is essential to providing effective care. With Activate CareHub’s alerts and notifications, social workers can understand and respond to what’s happening in each individual’s life, wherever they are accessing care across your local ecosystem of healthcare, behavioral health, and social services providers.
In the true spirit of social work, your clients and patients can access Activate Care.
Trust is important for social workers to build meaningful relationships with their clients and help them effectively. That’s why Activate Care’s platform makes care more open and transparent by inviting those you serve to join in their case management with you, with self-service access for them and their families, caregivers, or loved ones.
Your clients don’t have to repeat their stories; let their Activate Care record speak for itself.
Trauma-informed communication is a day-to-day practice in a social worker’s line of work. Your technology should follow suit. With access to a full history of every outreach attempt and encounter, social workers can easily understand each client’s unique situation and adjust their care accordingly. You can filter this information by type, date/time, participants, setting, mode, duration, and outcome.
Your client and their goals should be at the center of the shared plan of care.
Every client is unique, which is why every client has their own unique goals and steps to achieve those goals. Activate Care supports client-centered goals by making it easy to document and track clients’ progress. With our platform, social workers can drive measurable results by setting goals, linking them to tasks, and making the connection between goals and outcomes crystal clear.
All of this leads to stronger, more effective and authentic healing relationships.
Authentic healing relationships are built by the care team using all of the above methods, alongside non-digital strategies, such as motivational interviewing and active listening, delivered with a harm reduction, trauma-informed focus. Activate Care makes it easier to do social work the way you want to do it - with your client’s interests at heart.
As people struggle with the many facets of their lives impacted by COVID-19 and social injustice, society needs social workers. As individuals and families struggle with the mental health and economic impact of the pandemic, society needs social workers. As vulnerable populations suffer from racist social policies, society needs social workers. As communities struggle to recover and rebuild, society needs social workers. Social workers can guide us into a fair and just future for everyone. Social work is more important now than ever. Social workers are essential.
- Michael Reeves, Castleton University
