Medical social work is a sub-discipline of social work, also known as hospital social work. Medical social workers typically work in a hospital, skilled nursing facility or hospice, have a graduate degree in the field, and work with patients and their families in need of psychosocial help. Medical social workers assess the psychosocial functioning of patients and families and intervene as necessary. Interventions may include connecting patients and families to necessary resources and supports in the community; providing psychotherapy, supportive counseling, or grief counseling; or helping a patient to expand and strengthen their network of social supports.
Medical social workers typically work on an interdisciplinary team with professionals of other disciplines (such as medicine, nursing, physical, occupational, speech and recreational therapy, etc.)
Famous quotes containing the words medical, social and/or work:
“Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I complacently accepted the social order in which I was brought up. I probably would have continued in my complacency if the happy necessity of self-support had not fallen to my lot; if self-support had not deepened and widened my contacts and my experience.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Dear Felix, I have found some work for you. First of all we must have an eye-to-eye monologue and get things settled.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)