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Social Work Practice Paper

Decent Essays

According to NASW standards, advanced clinical practice competency in depression care for social workers requires that clinicians demonstrate knowledge and skill in assessing and managing symptoms, communicating with patients and families, and providing evidence-based interventions (NASW Standards for Clinical Social Work in Social Work Practice, 2005; NASW Standards for Social Work Practice in Health Care Settings, 2005). Depression is prevalent in later life with serious negative outcomes leading to further disability, higher health costs, and mortality (Hoeft, Hinton, Liu, & Unutzer, 2016). Chronic conditions such as cancer, heart failure, pulmonary and Parkinson’s diseases are significant risk factors for late life depression (Wu, Schimmele, & Chappelle, 2012). Delivering quality comprehensive care to older adults with chronic disease and depression is often a complex and challenging task, and thus, academic preparation for these situations is an important goal. Educational methods for evaluating depression care skills must include interactive performance-based strategies, common in other helping professions. For social work students, clinical exposure via field internships focused on geriatric depression care is one valuable method. However, not all students are offered these …show more content…

Yet, current educational methods on measuring and evaluating clinical skills lack robustness and academic standardization. The gap between academic coursework and field internship performance remains challenging. Previous reports (Badger & MacNeil, 1998; Emlet, 2010) have provided strong justification for the use of standardized patient methodology, especially in an era of research-informed practice with an emphasis on client

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