Social Work Practice with Hispanic Elders

Social Work Practice with Latino EldersDana AdamsGerardo Cantu is a get the hang level fond figureer at The Family Center. Gerardos current dapple with The Family Center, he is Class Facilitator and Case Manager. The Family Center offers individual and family interest to elderly lymph glands and their families in a warm and take forive atmosphere. The Family Centers commerceal aggroup completes a pure(a) comprehensive assessments to jock determine problem atomic number 18as along with care plans to see as an ongoing monitoring tool. The Family Center involves and engages the client in the care plan process as it serves as the basis of ongoing communicating amongst the family, client, and Case Manager.Mr. Cantu works with families who are warmth for older relatives and has a vital role in a share of a multidisciplinary team that manages the total scope of the needs of elder clients. Mr. Cantu has worked with The Family Center for eleven years, and is new in his rol e of Case Manager for elderly clients. This tribe is newly served at The Center and has only been in operation for sextuplet months. Mr. Cantu currently manages Twelve cases and completes bi-monthly, in- fellowship(a) visits with clients and their families. During home visits, Mr. Cantu provides informal counseling and complaisant sanction by listening, understanding, entanglementing, empowering, and encouraging.During his internship for his Master of Social Work degree, Mr. Cantu worked at a local wellness department where he acquire the logistics of running(a)(a) with elderly Hispanic clients and this role in his internship created a road map for his current position with The Family Center. Mr. Cantu is bilingual in English and Spanish, and aided employed case managers with providing accessary interpretation run to Hispanic clients. Through community outr apiece, he learned to enroll clients for medical insurance through the wellness insurance marketplace, assisted wi th providing patient assistance for filling out applications for Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, and free medications for hapless income patients.As a Class Facilitator and Case Manager with The Family Center, Mr. Cantu conducts home visits, assessments, patient intakes, creates patient care plans based on the clients medical, psychological, and social needs. He as well leads a monthly turn out group for caregivers, educating them on physical, emotional and pecuniary strain of caring for their loved ones and teaching them how to balance their responsibilities at home and work. In the present moment, Mr. Cantu states he is pleased with the program and feels The Family Center is do the needs of families in the local area who need assistance and view as with caring for their loved ones.Writer asked Mr. Cantu almost the importance of networking within the federal agency and if he faced either challenges obtaining needed services for his clients. Mr. Cantu explained how networking involves a long number of agencies working together to enhance well-organism and how it takes a pastiche of agencies to network together to help individuals achieve their goals. Some agencies The Family Center network with for food, medical, financial, day care, and Hispanic services assistance is The United Methodist Church, theater of operations Agency on age, Mobile County Health Department, Catholic Social Services, and The Guadalupe Center. The master(prenominal) challenge Mr. Cantu faces is providing adequate transportation services to the clients due to there being a high demand for services in the area. Mr. Cantu assists with transporting clients to scheduled appointments.Applying detailed thinking, motivational, and listening skills and empowerment within the context of his professional social work act and The Family Center, Mr. Cantu understands the value base of the profession and its ethical standards and principles. He states that he always utilizes arrange wit hout discrimination and with respect, knowledge, and skills related to clients age, class, color, culture, disability, ethnicity, family structure, gender, marital status, national origin, travel religion, sex, and sexual orientation. As stated by Mr. Cantu, he has dedicated his deportment to helping others and his two prayers are Use me and Thank you.Mr. Cantu uses communications skills differentially across diverse populations and communities and seeks necessary funda noetic lawal qualifying if needed. Developing a trusting relationship with my clients enables me to serve as a liaison between them, the community and social service agencies to facilitate access to services and help improve ethnical competence and the quality of service delivery (G. Cantu, in-person communication, February 1, 2017). Reflective use of theoretical approaches and knowledge bases underlies his lend oneself with attention to the behavior course perspective. Evaluating his social work practice and practicing in ways that are culturally and gender appropriate with low income persons and with those who redeem experienced social and economic injustice is essential in his role at the agency.When asked about his most memorable case, his response was of a client who thought he was her grandson and how she would cook for him during the visit and would not allow him to leave until he correct his plate. He said that he would confuse to beg her to leave the home sometimes because she would try to describe him go to bed and rest. When asked if there were any instances of him having difficulty leaving the home, he explained how one day he had cargo deck until the clients grandson come to the home so that she could see both together to view that he was not who she thought he was. Mr. Cantu mentioned that it took 2 hours for the grandson to come to the home. Mr. Cantu evince that he would not choose done anything different because his last target is to upset his clients, but to re assure them.This writer asked Mr. Cantu about culturally naked assessments use by the agency used on the elderly Hispanic clients is the Bruininks Motor Ability Test for adults (B-MAT) because the test helps develop an assessment to support service users, families, and clinicians in determining the level of independence with their activities of daily living, support the interference process and monitor the clients progress (Kesler, Lynn, Sullivan, Thompson, 2011).Family plays an important role when caring for the aging and much attention needs to be given to micro, mezzo and macro systems dissembleing the client system. Intervention are used within the individual, family, group, memorial tablet and community levels. With generalist social work practice, client system assessment is an ongoing social work skill used with all intervention levels and throughout the client intervention process (Hays, 2008).The micro approach focuses on major contributions from the biological, behav ioral and social sciences that are essential for understanding the person-in-environment. The mezzo-level practice is concerned with interpersonal relations that are somewhat less loose than those associated with family manner, but more personally meaningful than those that occur among organizational and institutional representative and the macro approach concentrates on development of knowledge and skills for practice in communities, organizations and other social systems. Culturally bleak social workers should have a standard practice of not making any assumptions when working with a diverse client system. This helps creates a lens that broadens the understanding of the client situation and value is placed on being culturally sensitive as one embraces diversity in the clients who are served by social workers (Hays, 2008).Completing this course assignment has enlightened this writer about the impact of physical, mental and emotional aspects of aging, and the micro and macro issu es of caregiving. Social work involves working with interrelated networks. The ecological hypothesis is an approach to social work practice that addresses transactions between people and their environment (von Bonsdorff, Ilmarinen, 2013). The person and the environment fag end be understood within their affiliation as they always have great impact on one another. The ecological theory is used for its ability to view the clients whole situation. The ecological theory looks at acculturation, language, and socioeconomic status. The framework, consisting of eight dimensions of treatment interventions (language, persons, metaphors, content, concepts, goals, methods, and context) can serve as a take out for developing culturally sensitive treatments and adapting existing psychosocial treatments to specific ethnic minority groups (von Bonsdorff, Ilmarinen, 2013). The Family Systems Theory focuses on how each member relate to one another. The family is a structure of subsystems and ev ery action/change within the subsystem affects each person. Changes are caused by both normative (predictable life cycle changes) and non-normative (crisis) stresses and the continuity theory states that the aging person try to preserve and maintain internal and impertinent structures by using strategies to maintain continuity to deal with changes that occur during the formula aging process (von Bonsdorff, Ilmarinen, 2013).Aging can be a nerve-racking and challenging situation for someone who is used to being active as they must learn to adjust to the mental, physical, emotional, and financial difficulty that is a part of aging. Social workers can help each individual manage, adjust, and cope with each of these issues. The main goal of a geriatric social worker is to make sure that the needs of the clients are being met. According to the Administration on Aging, the number of elderly Americans over the age of 60 jumped from 378 million in 1980 to 759 million in 2010 (US Departmen t of Health and Human Services, 2008). Administration on Aging. A Statistical Profile of Older Americans 65. The National Institute of Aging estimates that 60,000-70,000 professionally trained social workers will be needed by 2020 to work with the older population (Cummings, Galambo, DeCoster, 2003). The discrepancy between the importance of providing services to Latinos, given their growing numbers, and the preparedness of social workers for serving this population is scare (Furman, Negi, Iwamoto, Rowan, Shuckraft, Gragg, 2009).Utilizing and implementing multicultural sensitivity is important within the social work profession because this encourages the clinician to focus on significant factors such as ethnicity, race, and spiritual components (Payne, 2014). it is withal important to learn about the clients from their perspective, maintain a positive mod outlook, and allow clients to come up with their own potential solutions by expression at the successes they have already e xperienced (Payne, 2007) rather than focus on what has not worked, or what a practitioner feels are most beneficial. Attaining cultural competence requires social workers to engage in honest and genuine personal self-assessment and introspection coupled with the willingness to challenge and overcome the ingrained stereotypes of Latinos and other minorities that have served to dehumanizing factors and implementing new perspectives that rehumanize minorities (Organista, 2007). Immigration can be a major life stressor and includes issues such as health disparities and acculturation (Garca, 2012). These issues can affect mental health in Hispanics who find that they have limited or no access to the resources of their host culture. Realizing how immigration impacts Hispanics will enhance my service provisions. This writer would be interested in volunteering as a mental health counselor at a free clinic or other organization in the Hispanic community. Since macro practice focuses on achie ving long-term change in the economic, political and social environment (Payne, 2014). This writer feels this would be a great avenue for advocacy in the Hispanic community.ReferencesCummings, S. M., Galambos, C., DeCoster, V. A. (2003). Predictors of MSW employment in gerontological practice. Educational Gerontology, 29(4), 295-312.Furman, R., Negi, N. J., Iwamoto, D. K., Rowan, D., Shuckraft, A., Gragg, J. (2009, April). Retrieved February 10, 2017, from National Center for Biotechnology Information http//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861823/Garca, J. (2012). amiable health care for Latino immigrants in the U.S.A. and the quest for global health equities. Psychosocial Intervention 21, (3), 305-318.Hays, P. A. (2008). Addressing cultural complexities in practice Assessment, diagnosis, and therapy (Vol. 10, pp. 11650-000). Washington, DC American mental Association.Kesler, K. E., Lynn, J. D., Sullivan, J. D., Thompson, J. M. (2011). Bruininks Motor Ability Test for Adul ts (B-MAT) Exploring Relationships Among Motor Assessments. Brenau University.Organista, K.C. (2007). Solving Latino psycho social and health problems Theory, practice and populations. Hoboken, NJ.Payne, M. (2014). Modern Social Work Theory. (4th ed.). simoleons LyceumUS Department of Health and Human Services. (2008). Administration on Aging. A Statistical Profile of Older Americans 65.von Bonsdorff, M. E., Ilmarinen, J. (2013). Continuity theory and retirement.