u/941026

I work in a continuing care retirement community, so we have all the way from independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care, long term care. I primarily work in the skilled and long term care divisions and love it-- I also occasionally help out in AL/MC. Love my job, love the community. However, budget changes have come, and now there is no room in the healthcare budget for my job anymore, and I am being made to move to the assisted living (AL) and memory care (MC) side and being under the AL budget. This change is supposed to take place starting next Monday.

I am super unhappy about this for several reasons, and am trying to see what I can do to mitigate/change this. However, it seems my job will primarily be with AL and MC. There has not been a SW in AL/MC at this company before. To my understanding, there is not a dire need that leadership in AL/MC had for a SW; the reason I'm being moved is budgetary. They are telling me I can have a big say in crafting the job description and make the parameters for the role more or less. But I'm struggling to see a need or a gap that I can fill over there. The administrator flat out told me that I would NOT be doing the UAIs or ISPs (however I'm meeting with leadership tomorrow and hopefully this can change). The nurse manager over there does those and is super involved in the residents' lives.

The way that leadership has thus far utilized me in AL/MC has been to participate in their annual care plan meetings, help facilitate moves between levels of care, and to solve little problems for the residents, like helping them fix a broken phone, or help a lady whose newspaper stopped being delivered. The care plan meetings are annual so they don't happen often, and the moves don't happen super often either. And the other day I met with the AL admin and she told me an example of how she sees me being utilized when I move: one resident is always emailing and calling her, and the admin believes it's due to loneliness. So I guess she wants me to solve that? I am not interested in being a therapist, I was not hired to do that, and I have no experience providing real therapy. Nor am I a volunteer there solely to provide companionship. I am struggling to know what I can do as a SW in AL/MC that will not be just filling up my time. I'm happy to fix people's phones and provide some companionship, but that cannot be the bulk of my job. I have an advanced degree, and the way that the AL admin has utilized me thus far (and how she seemingly plans to use me) has not respected or acknowledged that.

Since the news came, I have been working on creating an annual social work assessment for the AL/MC residents, with things like reviewing POA/AMD, code status, social and behavioural functioning, cognitive and depression screenings, etc. But that is not something that is currently supposed to be being done; I'm just creating it as something I could do. And doing it to what end? Will it improve the lives of the residents there, for some assessment to just go and sit in their chart? I have also thought about facilitating support groups as an idea, but the chaplains currently run all of the ones that we already have. I suppose I could meet with them to collaborate on them and/or try and create a new one.

I am in the process of supervision towards licensure, so for that and other reasons, I REALLY do not want to leave this job. I only just started last August. I am passively looking for new jobs but it's scarce out here. Tomorrow when I meet with leadership, I'm going to propose to them that I keep one hall in healthcare, bc I also don't believe that whatever they'll have me do in AL will fill up 40 hours a week. I would really appreciate any advice on how I could be effectively utilized as an AL social worker and/or what role SW can serve in this environment with this population.

Thanks for reading my rant.

TLDR what can a social worker do in an assisted living environment?

Niche Medical Social Work Roles