Reconstructing Palliative Care: A Beginning
The mission and values of social workers practicing in healthcare and palliative care specifically can be overshadowed by hierarchical systems where we are a minority profession. While medical colleagues and systems are working to confront the history of racism and abuse of marginalized persons and correct bias and inequities, social workers need to interrogate their participation in promoting practices that may in fact perpetuate a white, western model of responding to serious illness.
The goal of this workshop is shared learning to begin to reconstruct palliative care practice, questioning some primary constructs and introducing diverse experts to evolve a model that both integrates and interrogates learnings and experiences of clinicians practicing over the past half century. Our intention is to highlight the unique “red thread” of skill, authenticity and values that is at the core of social work practice and essential to the care of patients and families as we self-educate toward the goals of restoring trust, challenging biases and mitigating inequities.
As we follow this connecting thread through aspects of practice such as ethics, inequities, culture and spirituality across settings and diagnoses, we maximize our abilities to identify and reconstruct opportunities for enriching care of patients and families, enhancing meaning in the work and impacting legacy. The established curriculum, insights and group discussion are the foundation for reinforcing our social justice mandate, identifying skills to challenge inequities and honor sources of meaning to both sustain and enrich the self, the work and our shared profession.
6 CEs available.