“What Do I Do Now?”

ABSTRACT

Recent advances made by medicine and psychiatry in the development of practice guidelines and evidence-based interventions are spreading to social work and other helping professions. As the movement toward evidence-based practice grows, more demands for the use of tested interventions will be placed on practitioners. In this paper, we argue that social work practice education must change to respond to this demand. Specifically, evidence-based interventions must be incorporated into the teaching of the middle phase of social work practice more than it is now. Social work training has traditionally relied on untested interventions that have come from the tacit knowledge of accumulated practice wisdom. Although tacit knowledge has an important place in social work practice, instructing students about evidence-based, empirically derived interventions provides them with critical knowledge and skills they will need to enter the competitive world of social work practice. Moreover, this approach amplifies the importance of launching practitioners with skills of evidence-based thinking; that is, the identification, evaluation, and selection of interventions with demonstrated effectiveness.

Key Words:

• Evidence-based practice
• teaching interventions
• social work practice