The FAMCare Blog

Health care social workers who support medical professionals are reporting a dramatic increase in burnout in America's nursing community.  They say that the rapidly escalating surge in COVID-19 infections across the U.S. has caused a shortage of nurses and other front-line staff in virus hot spots that can no longer keep up with the flood of unvaccinated patients and are losing workers to burnout.

On a recent call with a professor in the social work department at a large Eastern university, we asked him what he saw as the human race's most vexing social problem. His answer was fascinating and quite unexpected. Below find excerpts from that conversation.

The nation's health care system is once again faced with overwhelming need pressing against limited resources. Medical professionals, including health care social workers, are forced to make hard choices that test the ethical boundaries of medical arbitrage. The scenarios below are all real-life situations communicated to GVT by health care social workers in the past month.

The climate change debate has centered on global warming for the last 10 years. Because the science tends to be arcane and somewhat opaque, the debate has become clouded with opinion rather than fact. However, the impact of severe weather events cannot be ignored.

The United States has the highest costs for healthcare of any industrialized nation and some of the worst health outcomes. The traditional fee-for-service model of delivery and payment is now seen as an ineffective model in terms of health and well-being. It is considered part of the reason the United States has such a poor healthcare ranking.

Our recent blog on the true cost of healthcare ignited a robust response from social workers who specialize in public health. This relatively new but growing social work specialty stresses a socio-epidemiological approach to the prevention and management of the chronic diseases that plague our society.

The healthcare debate rages on. Politicians on both sides of the aisle insist that they have the answer to the staggering cost of healthcare in the United States, but no concrete solutions have emerged. One party tends to favor socialized medicine while the opposition, agreeing that healthcare should be available to all citizens, hasn’t figured out how to pay the staggering bill.

It is a serious misperception to view social workers as low paid civil servants who push paper on behalf of the less fortunate and perhaps undeserving. Social workers occupy a unique position in our social fabric.

From the very outset, the history of social work is populated with empathetic leaders who, upon discovering profound human suffering, not only offered a helping hand but immediately set out to change the social conditions contributing to the suffering. Social work's earliest pioneers - Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Grace and Edith Abbott, among others—laid the foundation of the profession's social leadership role and, to this day, this inclination to activism sets social workers apart from other civil servants.

In the beautiful red rock canyon setting of Sedona, Arizona, Caroline Diehl works tirelessly in a cold shed every morning before sunrise filling backpacks with food staples to distribute to hungry local school children.

Ensuring your computer systems and employees are Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant is something that is of the utmost importance for agencies who deal with health information that must remain private and safeguarded. While training to be HIPAA compliant can vary based on your industry, one area that can reach across the board is proper computer etiquette.