Learning to write was traditionally left to the Liberal Arts. Practical considerations have minimized liberal arts education at the university level leaving the training in the 3 Rs to elementary and high school teachers. This major shift in our educational philosophy has left social service workers ill prepared to write at the level required by the profession. FAMCare human services software goes a long way to fill this educational gap.

FAMCare’s Hidden Solution

To A Problem That Nags All Social Workers

Colleges and Universities no longer teach nor require excellent writing skills. As a result, many of our new graduate social workers are ill prepared to deal with the requirements of documentation. Although they may be highly effective when interacting with clients, newly minted social workers struggle to create the increasingly more intricate, thorough, incisive, comprehensive, accurate, and integrated documentation required to meet professional standards.

In Social Work Documentation, 2^nd Edition, Nancy L. Sidell states the problem clearly:

Social workers must document the services they provide, regardless of their educational level or the setting in which they are employed. Many are unprepared for this responsibility. Social work programs teach skills necessary for effective social work practice but often leave instruction about professional documentation to agency field instructors. Social workers should arrive at the workplace well prepared to document, but often they do not, and most agencies hiring new social workers must train them on the job.

Documentation is how a social worker communicates what happens in their work; the means by which cases are managed; and the manner in which services are evaluated, assessed, and often reimbursed. It is a required professional social work function, a permanent record of client service provision.

Either because social workers are not properly trained or prepared for the amount of writing they must do, or because it is time consuming and difficult, social workers are often negative when it comes to documentation. Their passion is to work with clients, and they see documentation as responding to unnecessary bureaucratic demands and tending to tedious and boring details.

The engineers at Global Vision Technologies designed FAMCare human services software to help social workers organize and communicate the complex inputs that accompany all social services functions.  The architecture that resulted has become the social worker's most effective writing tool.

• FAMCare is first a web-based information and data management system. It allows a case worker to collect information from a wide variety of sources and organize the information into a cogent document.

• It offers a social worker the opportunity to customize field names and personalize data points so that information flows to the appropriate client's records and can easily be transformed into an intelligent, incisive, and accurate document.

• Using FAMCare, input is collected in real time so critical notes are never lost or forgotten.

• Because of FAMCare's unique architecture, taking accurate notes is about all the writing a social worker needs to do. Formal documentation practically writes itself when all the inputs have been accurately entered into FAMCare's data management system.

Learning to write was traditionally left to the Liberal Arts. Practical considerations have minimized liberal arts education at the university level leaving the training in the 3 Rs to elementary and high school teachers. This major shift in our educational philosophy has left social service workers ill prepared to write at the level required by the profession. FAMCare human services software goes a long way to fill this educational gap.