Implications of Social Work Practice in the United States

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Implications of Social Work Practice in the United States

Social work practice can be termed as the professional practice of social work techniques, values and principles in counselling individuals, helping people get tangible services or helping groups and communities better their health and social services. For an individual to work as a social worker, they must have knowledge and skills in human development and behaviour. Social workers work with different groups of people, focusing on the most vulnerable groups like the poor. Depending on the area of specialization, social workers also work with policymakers to form social policies. The United States is one of the states that have heavily invested in healthcare. Despite all the spending, it is still not showing improvements in various health indicators like life expectancy. The infant death rate in the United States is triple that of other countries in the Organization for Economic Corporation and Development, followed by heart diseases and high levels of obesity. In this essay, social work practice implications with an increased population in the US will be discussed.

Let us say, for instance, the population in the United States in the future increases intensely; the possible result is an increase in demand for social work services( Etkind et al.,2017). Although the increase in demand for services in the future cannot be accurately predicted, it is most likely that an increase in population will raise the need for paraprofessional and professional for social workers to meet the demand. Most likely, the number of individuals working as socials workers may increase with time. Still, it is not easy to predict the number of paraprofessionals and social workers who might opt to substitute social work with other careers. Several factors are likely to influence the number of people choosing to work as social workers. They include the labour force’s ability to employ more social workers, the state of long–term financial systems, the shift in demand for social services, and the efficiency rate of social work interventions in the long run.

When the population increases, the need for social services will also increase, and social work responsibilities will increase (Bone et al., 2018). An increase in responsibilities will call for an increase in benefits and wages for all social workers. As time progress, new responsibilities and needs arise, and the social service sector is not an exemption. New demand for social services is likely to arise, which will call for better and more skilled social workers. Most people working in this sector will need to take the career development path for positive social work outcomes. Career development can be quite costly, and this causes professional workers to increase their expected salary and benefits. Some social workers practice the job but have not gone through professional training to become professional social workers. With the increased population, high skilled social workers will be in high demand than untrained social workers because of the need to improve social service outcomes.

Soon in the united states, the training centres for social workers will need to be more diversified and advanced for them to train and equip the social worker trainees with the required skills to deal with more challenging situations. The big population will need more workers to attend to them, raising the need for more training facilities in the United States. The policymakers will also need to formulate more and better policies to ensure all targeted population has accessible social service care around them. The death rate is also expected to increase with an increase in population. Because of lack of access to social services, high cases of individuals dying because of health-related conditions will be reported.

References

Bone, A. E., Gomes, B., Etkind, S. N., Verne, J., Murtagh, F. E., Evans, C. J., & Higginson, I. J. (2018). What is the impact of population ageing on the future provision of end-of-life care? Population-based projections of place of death. Palliative medicine, 32(2), 329-336.

Etkind, S. N., Bone, A. E., Gomes, B., Lovell, N., Evans, C. J., Higginson, I. J., & Murtagh, F. E. M. (2017). How many people will need palliative care in 2040? Past trends, future projections and implications for services. BMC medicine, 15(1), 1-10.