Effect of Rising Costs on Social Work Field
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The field of social work, like virtually all other fields in the helping profession, is currently undergoing several modifications that both advantageously and disadvantageously influence the manner in which practitioners now ply their craft. Of those variables that deserve the greatest amount of attention influencing the field of social work are the phenomenally rising costs of all facets of health care, the decreasing allowances for mental health care by insurance companies compounded by an increasing incidence of mental illness, and the prevalence of short-term mental health care allocations provided by insurance companies in an effort to curtail their overhead expenditures. The over-arching issue here is twofold; that is, there is evidence that social work programs may not be providing the necessary background to their enrollees to allow them to competently deliver services in an ever-changing health care environment, and there appears to be a lag between the conduct of relevant research and its application within the field of social work. As a result of these issues, there is the probability that social workers may well be impeded in the practice and competent performance of their duties. Given this, there exists a dire need among social work programs to insure that course curriculum keep abreast with the external world, so that graduates will be better prepared to competently practice their profession. Further, there is the need for s
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lum courses and the use of textbooks that entail consideration of the variables within the external environment of the organization. As an example of this, consider that the rising costs of health care have literally crippled the ability of social workers to provide services that are congruent with the ways in which they were trained.
Weingarten (1990, p. 4) reports that Los Angeles County, located within the State of California, along with numerous other similarly financially situated local governments throughout the country, has of late experienced markedly declined service provision for the medically ill. For the Fiscal Year 1991-1992, the entire Department of Health Services is scheduled for a $9.6 million budget cut, which increased from $7.6 million. Rainey (1990, P. J1) notes that the State of California had already cut by $40 million the amount of funding provided to Los Angeles County for the provision of health care services during 1990. The result of these budgetary cuts is that in excess of 500 employees have been either terminated or laid off, more than six outpatient clinics have been drastically reduced in terms of service provision, all but one vocational therapy department have closed, all hospitals have un
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Approximate Word count = 2576
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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