Social Work Assessment: What Are We Meant To Assess?

ABSTRACT

The social work assessment, which takes account of a range of factors, contrasts starkly with health assessment tools which focus individually on one small part of a patient’s functioning. The social work assessment may be viewed with suspicion, or even outright hostility, by hospital professionals particularly if the outcome is different to the prevailing opinion of the multi-disciplinary team. Increasingly, obtaining a global, holistic assessment is becoming difficult as hospitals develop a range of strategies to ‘speed up’ the discharge process. These strategies impact patients’ physical and mental health. Older patients with a cognitive impairment are disproportionately affected – the very group whose hospital admissions are rising fastest. As hospital stays shorten, the assessment is done earlier. Social work managers allocate dwindling resources on a basis of need. The social work assessment is increasingly driven by indicators of ‘critical’ and ‘substantial’. Lower levels of need or need that cannot be met by current service provision is simply not recorded. Thus, the social worker bases the assessment on less information, on a patient subjected to additional factors, using indicators designed to control budgets. However, social work resources are charged so patients themselves may pay the price for an inaccurate assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Scotland
• social work
• hospital discharge
• complex

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hilary Wilson qualified as a social worker in 1993. She has worked in seven local authorities across the UK in a range of settings, predominately in adult care and in hospital social work. Hilary Wilson currently lives in South East of Scotland and works in a local authority team facilitating hospital discharge.