JBS 9/15/2018
RESULTS
From the 2006 National Nursing Home Social Services Study
There was an opportunity for respondents to write in comments. Social work students typed in all the comments. These comments will also be analyzed as part of the study. Here is a sample of some of the comments.
Well detailed and well researched
Very good—made me really think and look at my job abilities.
Good, asks very important questions pertaining to SW issues.
I thought it was very interesting and made me realize how much I really love my job.
Very good. Leads to some good thought. May even adapt job descriptions to include some items.
Missed detail of how long term have you worked in current facility (9 wks for me).
Generalized
Too long
Useless unless it is used to help with culture change.
I love my job! There are times when I feel inadequate because the “Social” person is expected to the be able to solve problems when the nurses can’t. Our facility works close with a geropsych unit across the road in hospital, but we have issues in our population that don’t meet criteria for geropsych unit. I need some help behavior in Long Term Care. We monitor, document, support, encourage, but sometimes it isn’t enough. Thank you!
From what I hear from other workers who work in a nursing home setting they end up not able to get enough support from other department of the facility. In this facility all I can say we work well together. All department heads make sure our residents needs are top priority. We respect, give them dignity that they deserve and treated well to have that quality of life that they deserve. I’m happy to say that I am proud of this facility & the people I work with. My boss is great.
In my opinion, at least at my facility, I feel social services is the dumping spot. If no one else wants to do the job they dump it on social services. Nurses need to be trained on how to deal with residents w/behaviors--many nurses just want to give residents a pill to calm them down. Social Services might be a little more effective if 1 social worker does MDS careplan while other does resident involvement. Yet work together for family involvement and issues.
I have become very intrigued and interested in the culture change/transformation movement. And, although we are not moving ahead as quickly as I’d like. I am happy with some changes we’ve made. I feel that social services staff logically will be at the forefront of this movement because we tend to see the elderly as people rather than patients. I would also like to see a decrease in the amount of paperwork we do. It seems more and more is acquired as new legislation is passed etc. As my boss says, it feels like the state/federal govt. is our customer sometimes rather than the resident. We expend so much effort to satisfy them. People work is so much more important than paperwork. and while we are in our offices working with papers, there are bored, lonely, hurting people needing us. This is a difficult thing for me—is to feel I am adequately meeting needs of the residents in the time allotted—besides everything else that needs to be done. I hear this from my colleagues often also. I also wish our state could pay Medicaid bills better. As of the middle of April 2005, if not for our church support donations, we could not survive. This makes it difficult to provide the “extras” for the residents that they deserve. It also makes it difficult to keep morale up.
Thank you for conducting this survey. As most jobs seems to be, there are never enough hours to spend just interacting and talking to residents to help brighten their day and make them feel like the special people they are.
I don’t think that a NH Social Worker should be employed by the NH. Right there is a conflict of interest. They should be employees of the state then you’d be able to truly advocate. There should also be a higher standard, i.e. more social workers per resident. I think people would find that there would be less overall complaints and in turn reducing the work load on the NH staff overall. But....what do I know?
Just like there are specialized trainings for school social work, there should be for nursing home social workers. Education is the key to doing a good job. I am still learning, but try to attend as many conferences as possible. Also, there are more geriatric behavioral issues to deal with and many psychiatric patients are aging along with the rest of us. We need to be prepared to address their concerns.