EFFECTIVENESS OF THE ROLE OF MEDICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC SOCIAL WORKERS WORKING IN HEALTH CARE FACILITIES

ABSTRACT

The medical and psychiatric social workers are employed to do various duties apart from providing counseling, therapy and rehabilitation services. They are assigned to perform case assessment, case managing, mediating, facilitating, liaising, admitting, discharging and referring patients to other services. This study focuses on the effectiveness of the role of medical and psychiatric social workers working in health facilities. This study was conducted in Vellore district and in Chennai through snowball sampling technique. The researcher aim to study the role of social workers in the medical and psychiatry settings in health facilities, kind of duties the medical and psychiatry social workers are assigned when working in interdisciplinary teams, whether the skills learnt and developed is applicable for their current role in work place, challenges the social workers face while working in hospitals. The research design used was descriptive design, the researcher used a self-structured questionnaire and non-probability snowball sampling as sampling technique. The findings showed that medical and psychiatric social workers role play a vital part in every health facility, medical and psychiatric social workers are assigned to perform various duties and they also involve in organizing, teaching and training of other professionals while working in interdisciplinary teams. The research also showed that the skills and social work methods play a major role in every social workers current job where they make use of community organization, social group work and case work. The major challenge faced by medical and psychiatric social workers was heavy workload and satisfaction of their work due to multiple assignment of duties and lack of appropriate services for the medical and psychiatric social workers and lack of recognition. Through the analysis, the researcher was able to bring out that there is a relationship between the respondents’ years of experience and pay scale, similarly there was an association between years of experience and workload. Based on the main findings it is suggested that the role of social workers should be recognized and the government should make social work a profession by providing license for its profession.

Keywords: Role, challenges and social work methods.