In a message dated 2/9/2002 8:58:03 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:


> Are they supposed to?
>
I dunno.  My previous next door neighbor was a social worker and our
socializin' was just fine.

I'm still not that checked out on the social worker's general function in
occupational life.  I only had a professional encounter with one, and for a
hospital employee with a major role in the life of an imminent hospice
patient (my Mom), this social worker was woefully out of the loop.

Nobody told my Mom that she was terminal, but the right hand didn't know what
the left hand was doing, so the social worker waltzed (it sounds better if I
say waltzed) right in the hospital room and started talking about hospice.
Nobody was there with my Mom -- no family, no friends.  I was at home and
couldn't travel at the time, and my nephew was nearly 100 miles away.  All I
know is that I called on the phone at that particular time and found my Mom
crying on the phone and saying that she couldn't talk just then.  Later the
social worker called me -- as soon as she returned to her office.  That's how
I know what happened.

I am sympathetic with this social worker, at least until I find out
information to the contrary.  I don't know that she didn't miss some
important meeting either.  Although, the oncologist's act with me was little
more than a bungled attempt at sophistry.  That helps me lean a little more
in favor of wanting to defend the social worker.

I'm actually wanting to call the whole thing criminal negligence, but we're
talking about my Mom here.  I'm sure that makes me radically different from
everybody else on this list, each of whom would be completely impartial and
objective given similar circumstances  ;-)

The social worker is a mushroom?  When she is the one who is going to broach
the subject of something as serious and infamously final as hospice, she is
kept in the dark?

Whatever good she came with that day, this social worker, whatever resources
she brought to offer were lost to my Mother, in the stark face of a
barbarically revealed truth.

To answer your question, I don't know what social workers are supposed to do.


Betty