Has anyone here transitioned to Social Work from Nursing?
I am considering a career change. Nursing has not worked out quite like I'd hoped. But I still have alot of medical knowledge. I also like to focus on the more psychosocial aspects of nursing. I would also like to be in a field with more regular hours.
I'm a remote/telehealth school based therapist for a public cyber school. I work for a contractor who schools contract out to. So I do not work for the school directly but the school I was working for decided I wasn't welcome back because they're claiming I "coordinated another placement for a student." Let me explain. I had a student whose disabilities and mental health diagnoses were largely the reason they were attending a cyber school. They expressed completely on their own wanting to return to an in person school setting. This was wonderful because it did show they were making progress in therapy. They maintained that's what they wanted to do, for months. They also expressed this to their caretaker who then began having conversations with me as well about her worries, concerns, what the transition would look like. All of which I supported her through, I encouraged the mom to bring this up to their case manager with the school which she did. Prior to the students annual IEP meeting I sent in my iep input and informed the case manager I unfortunately would not be able to attend but that their interest in wanting to go back to in person should be discussed. Weeks go by, the student and caretaker then decide the in person public school is not really an option due to poor ratings and mom researches and finds a specialized school that potentially fits their needs but to get any more info, required a referral from the current school. Mom reached out to the case manager, and I also sent an email including mom on it. Just doing coordination of care like I know how to do. Over a period of 4 months, the school continued to not respond to me or mom and or passed the matter to a different staff member claiming they didn't know the referral process. These were case managers and school counselors. Mind you, it's now summer and the upcoming school year is not far off. The family doesn't even have the information they need on this specialized school to make a decision if they would or would not go. I saw the student for summer sessions and when we concluded for the summer, at this point with nothing happening with the referral, they were intent on returning to the cyber school but were open to still getting the info on the other school, maybe even touring it. Just to have it as an option in the future. Finally the school makes the referral. Then they ask to meet with my boss and tell them I'm not welcome back.
I have written documentation- emails that went to the school, communication logs, session notes all that explicitly state that the student was expressing wanting this and that the parent was looking into other schools. I never recommended anything. I was just supporting their wishes.
So I was let go because of doing what I wholeheartedly believe was my job. The school is upset because it they lose this student, they lose money. It's about money and a total lack of about what's in best interest of the child. Also relevant, the student was not performing well in the cyber school. They didn't attend classes and almost failed the past two years. Meeting with me was the only consistent school thing he attended. This suggests this cyber school was not meeting his needs. And had the school ever actually reached out and had a conversation with the parent and offered more support maybe they could have worked out a way to return them.
The worst part about this to me is this means no closure with any of my students or families. Because I no longer hold a contract at that school I'm not supposed to have contact with them. Students and families who have dealt with loss and who I provided total reassurance to that if and when I leave we will prepare for that because never did I think something like this would happen that's totally out of my control. Families that I made concrete plans with about when I'd be reaching out and plans for the next school year. I feel like they're going to be totally blindsided and hurt. I cannot understand how or why the school thought letting me go would solve anything for them and that they would choose to do so at the expense of students and their treatment.
I am considering filing a complaint with the state because I believe this violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and American's with Disabilities Act which state you cannot retaliate against staff for advocating for a student with disabilities.
My agency is needing a new color printer. The main thing we use the color printer for is to print photos of injuries or homes. I have been tasked with finding options, and I was curious what other agencies use. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Hey, I just have a question for you all who have decided to get into Social work. I have been thinking thats what I want to get into. Im currently am going to therapy and trying to work on my traumas and problems, and just going through all it has made me think I want to do that for someone. I want to help someone through their issues the way mine has helped me so far. I still have a lot of work to do on myself. But I guess my question is, Is that a good reason? Or is it just like some sort of trauma response to something? I feel like I've always want to be that person that someone can come to for help and that I could help them even though I wouldn't accept that kind of help from anyone myself and maybe thats why?
Anyway, I also want to hear if any of you had any experience with this type of situation or what made you decide to do this kind of work?
(Also I didnt know which flair to put this under, so if that one doesnt apply, sorry!)
Anyone else want to run away and live in a cabin? And pretend we don't live in a world with people who would choose to injure, maim, sexually assault, and/or murder children? That's the kind of day I'm having. It's just getting harder since having my own sweet precious innocent baby.
Guys are you able to live your life as a caseworker while still being able to go out and have a good time? I’m young, newer to this job (and granted, it is a lot to ingest don’t get me wrong) but I’d still like to live my life!! Current caseworkers, have you lost the ability to be out on the town because of casework as a career?
Hi all, I want to hear your thoughts and suggestions about my supervisor’s recent guidance, as I have started to distrust her judgement. It makes me not want to ask her things in supervision or ask for advice.
Example- I worked with a client who was expressing suicidal ideation and I was finding it difficult to contain our working relationship to my role focus. I had a moment where I had to respond to a suicidal ideation disclosure and I called my manager to ask for guidance. I ended up doing all the right things in the end and it was fine. I also learned from this moment and was able to implement the guidance from my manager within the next few days around boundary setting and being more clear about my role. There has not been a similar issue since.
I felt like this was all fine- except my manager had been pushing me to close with the client ASAP so I don’t “hold risk.” The client has other workers to turn to for her mental health, and we still had goals we were working on that were within my role.
There have been other similar situations faced by my coworkers. They tell her that they are feeling stressed/frustrated etc about a client’s behaviour, and then she blames the client and tells the worker to close. She makes assumptions about clients without knowing their full stories, and doesn’t seem to attempt to think of their perspective or reasons behind behaviours. I believe that as social workers, we should be able to work with the complexities of clients and manage our own feelings whilst doing the best we can to serve the clients. We can’t close clients because we find them a little challenging?
My caseload is extremely overloaded, which I am continually working to get down to a manageable workload. When going through my cases during a supervision, my manager quite bluntly and harshly told me to close like 90% of my clients. Questioning why I had them open when I had them open for good reasons. It felt like she just didn’t want me to be stressed and overworked so was not even considering the clients at all when telling me to close them. Keep in mind also - my caseload has been crazy for at least a year, partly due to my poor time management, partly due to my supervisor not really ever looking at my workload or giving me proper advice on how to manage it all. I am meant to have a supervision every fortnight, but this year I have probably had about 5? We are fixing this now since I spoke to her about it, but still concerned about her total lack of empathy in regards to telling me to close so many of my clients.
It feels like our supervisor can’t sit with us as workers during supervision and help us reflect on our work with clients in a productive way. I believe if a client is challenging us we should sit with this and work through it, looking at different perspectives, putting ourselves in their shoes, trying different ways of working. It feels like the supervisor has a protective knee jerk reaction to just tell us to close, or dismiss the client’s situation with little empathy.
Our supervisor is old and very experienced, but also quite defensive around her own actions and decisions. I have occasionally done well with giving her feedback, but there have been several times where she got too defensive to even seem to try to understand what we are telling her.
There are also many other things that she does that are not great, but I don’t want to make the post too long so I’ll write them very shortly:
- shares employee reasons for calling in sick and their diagnoses with other employees
- talks badly about employees to eachother
- not-so-subtly hinted to our team at a meeting about how one of our coworkers was being performance managed while they were not present
- talked loudly about a placement student behind their back to employees when they could have heard
- constantly seems to dismiss clients’ situations with little empathy, as if clients are too demanding of their workers when asking for small basic things. seems to automatically assume that clients are too lazy? or attention seeking?
- told a client off harshly in front of several people, client made informal complaint, supervisor was not self reflective on her actions at all and instead framed them as being good because the client advocated for themselves in making a complaint and has been engaging well with services now
From what I know, nobody else in the organisation is aware of these things. I have only spoken to my close coworker about this, and hoping to somehow also hear from other coworkers in the team but I don’t see them very often to be able to have a private chat.
I am thinking of sharing my concerns with someone, but fearful that she will turn on me, especially while my workload is not fully up to scratch. I get along pretty well with her, and am generally not super good at confrontation. I know she tries to be supportive and actually is a lot of the time, and is really chill about stuff like taking sick days and annual leave, but this stuff is worrying.
Would you do something about all of this??
Noticing old coping skills coming up by using my phone to avoid, distract and dissociate myself after some client heavy days. Provides a sense of guilt after as I’m not doing what I want or even need. Hoping some some advice from others who notice this in themselves and quick cognitive or somatic interventions
I work in a pediatric oncology clinic with several doctors and NP’s and I am the only social worker. There is one female doctor who is Indian and she treats me like I am completely inferior to her. It is maddening. She seems to think my time is not as important as hers and gets upset if I don’t pretend to be less intelligent in my field than she is in hers. I’ve been in social work for 25 years. She’s been a doctor for 6 years. However, she leaves her prayer mat casually folded on a shelf in my very small office, even though I’ve taken it back to hers, and asks if it’s ok to pray in my office while I’m in it. She says to go on about what I’m doing so I do. It doesn’t offend me. I’m just curious as to why she treats me this way.
The Trump administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — or ending their support altogether.
Hello everyone!
I would like to get your perspective on how to structure a meeting with a patient in primary care. The reason I asked this is because it is a brand new pilot projecr with a partner organization that i work for and then we are embedded in to a primary care practice. For background, I am a social worker in Canada. And have over 15 years experience. The model just confuses me and I dont see other examples of this in Canadian medicine in my Google searches. I dont know if im on the right track and there is minimal clinical supervision.
How it works- patients with mental health appointments with their doctor will see Social Work for 30 mins prior to dr appointment. Here we can screen for SDOH issues and provide resources or do some very brief counselling or psychoeducation. Then we chart the meeting and the Dr has the notes to refer to prior to their appointment with patient. Before their appointments that day, patients fill out GAD 7 and PHQ 9 and it is in their chart.
I'm struggling with how to structure these appointments with patients. There is no real guidance, so basing it on what would be most effective for patient.
Here are 2 problems-
1- patient isnt choosing to see Social Work, it is just part of their appointment
2- we dont have follow-up appointments we can book freely (no control over schedule) and no caseload or ongoing.
As of right now I just check-in with patients re. Current symptoms (better, worse, the same?). Life stressor, coping, resources, social supports, income, etc etc.) And then pass them along. Sometimes there is room to talk about more clinical tools or psychoeducation, but the patient does not know me, and I dont want them to have to discuss all this difficult historical stuff and then have no follow-up care.
I suppose we have different goals with the clinic wanting to help with Dr availability and our program wanting to support the client more holistically- which im not sure this is happening??
Am I missing something? Is this helpful? I am so curious to get your thoughts. I am nervous about his being on reddit so will most likely delete in a little bit!!
To make a very long story short, I’ve had 3 jobs in less than 4 years. The first job, I resigned because of the way they treated me when my father died. It was a private practice where I worked part time and really only made $60/hour. When my dad passed they gave me a hard time and had me call my clients to cancel for the week. It was horrible and sad for me to do. I had been there for 9 months. Then after taking time off I started working at another private practice. They were lovely people. Really, considerate and helpful. I got head hunted by the place where I am now. I’ve been here for 6 months and I am burnt out. The pay is great but the mental health program is only me in a health clinic and we are asked to do services that I have had to inform providers that are not what I can do under my license and that are unethical. I am an afterthought at best and a dumping ground at worst. My question is, how will this look like in a resume? What can I say that won’t come off as “flaky” or accusatory of previous employers?
36F, LMSW, southern United States.
I was recently terminated from my job at a social services nonprofit that I had held for about 4 years. I have mental health episodes that cause me to shut down and no call, no show, sometimes for several days. It had happened twice in the past, and my boss has been kind and understanding. But the last time they had said if it happened again, I may be terminated. Well it happened again. I got fired. I take full responsibility and do not blame my employer for making this decision.
I'm embarrassed and horrified and very sad, but it may have been the wakeup call I needed to get my shit together - I'm seeing a therapist more regularly, getting back on meds, and focusing more on my own wellness. But now I'm left with a question of - what now?
I've never had to look for a new job without a good reference from my most recent employer. I asked my boss when I left if they'd be willing to write a reference for me. They were unsure and said they would want to be honest if asked how things ended. I get that. So how do I explain this?
Other career related subs say to lie, lie, lie, or at least lie by omission. Say it was "not a good fit" or that "our values were not aligned." And obviously I would not go as far as to disclose my mental health details to a potential employer in an interview. But I'm left with uncertainty about how to handle this delicately.
The way I see it, I have these options:
-Ask my former boss for a reference and hope they don't ask about how things ended
-Ask a different colleague for a reference and ask if they're willing to fib for me (this feels icky and risky)
-Do not offer a reference from my most recent employer and be vague or not completely truthful in explaining why the job ended
-Apply for jobs outside the field without a current employer reference - I have overarching criticisms of the nonprofit sector that I feel comfortable elaborating on, as a reason why I'm leaving the field
-Option 5, aka something I haven't thought of yet?
What would you do?
Hello! Does anyone know of online CEUs for a renewal that’ll be completed in NY?
Someone mentioned TPN Health, but not sure NY accepts it.
Mine expires 7/2027 and I haven’t done any as of yet. Any suggestions are welcome!
I’m seriously considering quitting my job without having another role lined up, and I’m wondering if anyone in social work has done the same.
I’ve worked in family violence for years and I actually loved my previous job. The work, the team and the environment were such a good fit for me. I never left because I was burnt out from social work or because I wanted to leave the FV sector.
Unfortunately, my long-term relationship ended and I had to relocate, which meant my old workplace was no longer realistically accessible. I took a new role in FV intake, and the difference has been huge.
There was essentially no proper training or induction before being expected to do the work. There’s very little sense of team, no real team building or connection, and the overall workplace culture has been really difficult. Intake itself also feels very different from the ongoing client work I was used to and enjoyed.
I feel like I’ve gone from being someone who genuinely loved going to work and felt confident and connected to my team, to someone whose body feels tense and anxious as soon as the workday starts.
The difficult part is that I’ve also had a huge amount of change in my personal life at the same time. I’ve lost my relationship, had to leave my home and relocate, lost the workplace and colleagues I loved, and had to adjust to an entirely new job and environment. I think I underestimated how much cumulative stress that would put on me.
I have a psychologist and I’m trying to manage things outside of work, but I’m starting to feel like I’ve reached a point where I genuinely need some time off rather than immediately jumping into another job.
Financially, quitting with nothing lined up scares me. So does having a gap on my resume or explaining why I left this role relatively quickly. But right now, even the thought of searching, applying and interviewing for another position while continuing to work full-time feels exhausting.
Part of me wants to resign, take a month or two to decompress and then start looking for another FV/case management role that is a better fit. The other part of me keeps telling myself that quitting without another job is irresponsible and that I should just push through.
Has anyone here actually quit due to burnout without having their next social work job lined up?
Did taking some genuine time away help you recover and find your way back to enjoying the profession, or did you regret leaving without another job secured?
I work in a very busy ER and one thing I've noticed is that physicians will often set the patient up with false expectations saying things like "the social worker will get you set up with housing." This gives the patient false hope and then often, the social worker ends up having to be the bad guy that tells the patient they cannot find housing right now for the patient. Other times, I deal with nurse case managers demeaning social workers and acting like they can do the job of social workers (they often can't). I have seen awful discharge planning from nurse case managers and it sometimes makes me want to scream (I do this internally) and ask for a *real* social worker to come deal with the situation. Is there a way that I can advocate for social workers in these situations? Is it even my battle to fight or would it be seen as overstepping? I just hate that you guys are so undervalued.
I’ve been a community-based SW for a few years. My job involves a lot of walking and public transit so I need to bring everything I need for the day which includes personal items, water bottle, headphones, notebook, and some paperwork or other. I got a foldable clipboard recently which is great for when I need to do paperwork with clients.
Of course I use a backpack and my back always hurts. Recently I saw a tactical fanny/waist pack, and it occurred to me this could be a lot more comfortable if I could make it work. The drawbacks are that it would be hard to find one that’s big enough for even a small notebook, foldable clipboard, and small water bottle; and I’d have to be a little more judicious about what carry around, and would occasionally have to switch out bags if I’m bringing large items or large amounts of paperwork to clients. (I hate switching bags; I always forget stuff.)
I’m going to check out my local army/navy surplus, but I’m just curious if anyone was able to make this work. If so, was the comfort worth the trouble?
I have an unlicensed MS in psychology. I have been in the “social work/psychology” field for about a year now. The company I work for is a nonprofit (running on grants and donors) in a medical marijuana legal state. I completed a pre employment drug screen and in the handbook it states they can test you if they have reason.
This being my first job in the field I’m curious if there are any particular positions or types of sectors in the field that would be more lenient on drug policy/randomized drug tests.
I saw someone say any workplace that gets federal funding would have to be drug free (marijuana still being illegal federally). Does anyone have more info on what makes an organization more or less likely to have these policies?
BUT I CANNOT GET AN INTERVIEW. It is incredibly frustrating. I am licensed and would like to work towards independent licensure. I need clinical hours and supervision to obtain independent licensure. I’m willing to do any facet of social work at this point. I’ve been working in the business realm but phew that is not for me. Feels so frustrating to hear about the mental health crisis we’ve been facing and not be able to even get an interview. Did I miss up by leaving and now trying to come back?
Hi everyone, I hope you’re taking care of yourselves. Last school year was my first year as a school social worker in a very small, underfunded, and understaffed area. I absolutely loved it and learned so much. For context, I have been an RCSWI for almost a year and worked really hard to earn hours for my LCSW license. Thankfully, I accrued 500 hours so far! The reason I left this job was because it is a 40 minute commute both ways from where I live and no mileage/reimbursements were offered for the community work I engaged in. There was no bad blood and I genuinely loved working there. I was at one school all day, had my own classroom, and had great relationships built with my colleagues and the kids. I have been working in the neighboring district as a “district school social worker”. I hate it, and it’s really hard for me to admit that. It’s the complete opposite from my last job, and that is kind of its downfall. Everything is super organized, there are resources everywhere, I won’t have to pay for a single thing, and the mileage is great. HOWEVER, I am visiting these schools and they already have social workers as staff. They have so many people employed for each little niche subject that I am used to handling all myself at my previous job. It’s almost like there is no room for me, and especially no space for me to do anything therapeutic. It almost feels like I am left with the scraps or the jobs the on-site social workers are too busy to handle. I honestly feel like a glorified intern. I haven’t spoken to a single child in a therapeutic setting since beginning two weeks ago. Here’s the issue, my biggest concern is getting those hours. In the interview I informed them that I was an RCSWI and getting hours is most important to me. I was told that wouldn’t be an issue. Now I am finding out that my job will mostly be running around the city delivering resources, attending meetings, holiday resources, and the occasional home visit. I was promised groups, but every school social worker/ guidance counselor that I’ve talked to about this is either taking care of it themselves or look at me like I’m insane for even asking. It’s almost like the district is overstaffed-if you believe in such a thing. I already spoke with the lead social workers about this and was told it’s about “building relationships” with all 4 schools I attend and finding where I fit in. They told me it would take a year to really “get it down”. One of my strong suits is rapport building, and that isn’t really the obstacle I’m facing. I also don’t want to have to convince someone or beg them to share responsibilities with me and to let me do my job. There’s always a position for me at my old district; thankfully, but I thought I was getting into a better fit. I also don’t feel like talking to someone higher up and being told it’ll take time, just stick it out, or that it’ll take a year before it gets better. This is not the position I was promised.