Week 11

This week's post will be pretty short as I was ill and didn't attend practicum. Therefore, this post will focus on the integration question.

Integration question:
HBSE: How might your assessment of a client differ from that of another person on your team, such as a nurse, doctor, or teacher?

At Larue Carter, there are many assessments of patients; nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. all have their roles and complete various evaluations. Psychiatrsists are primarily concerned with the medical treatment of psychiatric disorders. Therefore, several distinctions exist between psychiatric and social work assessments.

When a psychiatrist evaluates a client, he/she focuses primarily on the patient's medical health. The assessment might include an evaluation of the general physical and mental health of the client. The social work assessment, on the other hand, may also include such areas as social, emotional, and/or physical assessments. The social work evaluation aims at looking at the entire picture of a client's life while the psychiatric assessment may focus exclusively on the patients medical health.

Obviously, each psychiatrist and social worker is different and thus so will be their evaluations. Therefore, it isn't possible to say for certainty what one's evaluation will entail. However, the medical profession specializes in treating a client from the medical perspective while the social work profession utilizes a number of perspectives in order to help a client. Psychiatry is quite specialized while social work can be quite broad. Even though there are similarities between what a psychiatrist and social worker do, definite boundaries do exist in each profession.