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- Title
Short-term Casework in a Medical Setting.
- Authors
Parks, Ava H.
- Abstract
This article presents short-term casework as a method of treatment and its place in the practice of social work in a medical setting. In terms of time and focus, short-term casework is from one to five one-hour interviews with the client, including all activity connected with the interviews, and casework treatment as attempted in selected areas of the client's problem. Traditionally, social workers have tended to downgrade short-term treatment; they have, in fact, often been apologetic as if it were second-class treatment. Identification with psychoanalytic concepts may account for a tendency to equate good treatment with long treatment. Somewhere between the brief-service case and the long-term treatment case is a large area of casework only tentatively and sometimes apologetically explored. Clearly identified and defined, short-term casework fills an area of unmet client needs when used consciously and selectively by the worker as the treatment of choice. Short-term treatment is treatment under pressure; it is demanding, exhausting; it can be threatening as well as exciting and rewarding. It requires an ability to get a social history quickly and accurately, a horizontal view of the patient's problems and situation, and a selection with the client of some aspect of his problems that can be treated in the time available.
- Subjects
SOCIAL work research; SOCIAL case work; INTERVIEWING; SOCIAL history; SOCIAL workers; SOCIAL health maintenance organizations
- Publication
Social Work, 1963, Vol 8, Issue 4, p89
- ISSN
0037-8046
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/sw/8.4.89