The Corona Virus pandemic has swooped down on the human race like a tornado onto a small Midwestern trailer park. Its impact has been sudden, uncontrollable, devastating, life-changing, and fear inducing. The entire human race has reacted.

Each year Social Work Today asks its readers to nominate their top-ten colleagues for outstanding service in the field. I like to publish the list here on our blog as a form of recognition and congratulations. However, what caught my eye this year was the element of a “calling” in each of their stories. To these successful case workers, social work is so much more than a job.

Many years ago (2008), I read an article in the summer edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly by Christopher Finney about what makes a great mission statement. Permit me to share excerpts of this incisive article.

According to the National Eating Disorder Association, up to 30 million people in the U.S. suffer from an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder. Worldwide the figure is more like 70 million sufferers!

Our American youth culture has forgotten our seniors. It isn’t accurate to accuse us of neglecting or abusing our seniors. No, caught up in the everyday business of our hyper-success culture, we simply don’t think about our senior population unless we have to. As long as we feel we’ve made reasonable accommodations for our seniors (Social Security and Medicare) we tend to pay closer attention to our careers and our children.

Going Mainstream

Homeschooling – parent-led, home-based education - is an age-old traditional educational practice that a decade ago appeared to be cutting-edge and “alternative” but is now bordering on “mainstream” in the United States. It may be the fastest-growing form of education in the country.

The Headline

After years of writing about the mass incarceration of Americans, it gives us great pleasure to share this headline with everyone in the social services community.

One way for a software solution to help you be HIPAA compliant is to offer you HIPAA encryption as part of the package. But is that something you need to be HIPAA compliant? Technically, no, it’s not mandatory.

The rules state you should use encryption if it would be needed to safeguard electronic Protected Health Information (PHI). But, they do say if you don’t use encryption, you need to have an alternative to encryption that will safeguard as well as encrypting would. Or you need to have documentation with justifiable cause, as to why have taken a different tact with regard to safeguarding PHI.

Nation Earns a Grade of C Amid Mixed State Showing

The new Education Week Research Center report, Quality Counts 2019, synthesizes 39 indicators that capture a range of school finance, academic achievement, and socioeconomic factors that affect the quality of state school systems. Southern states with high poverty rates dominate the lower rankings, but overall, 32 states earn grades between C-plus and C-minus. Why does the U.S. educational system consistently get low marks for student academic achievement?

We recently conducted an informal poll of the social workers we deal with every day and asked them what they thought was the #1 social malady threatening the country today. Their answer might surprise you; more than the opioid epidemic; more than veterans affairs; more than homelessness; more than woman’s rights; more than economic imbalance; more than education issues; more than civil rights; more than the environment; the problem that was cited more than any other was – STUDENT DEBT!