Fall 2024 SOWK 581.1 Class 08 Weekly Email

MyHeritage Syllabus Presentations Emails

I hope that you are all starting off with a good week.

Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week eight is an asynchronous week, during which we will focus on learning about treatment planning and documentation. We will examine how we plan for the interventions we do as social workers through treatment plans. We will also consider documentation and the ethical and practical considerations we make when using documentation.

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to demonstrate the ability to write a SMAARRT goal and a SOAP note
• Students will consider the ethics around documentation

Unit Assignments

Read

• Mancini (2021) Person-Centered Treatment Planning a chapter in Integrated Behavioral Health Practice
• Reamer (2005) Documentation in Social Work: Evolving Ethical and Risk-Management Standards
• Bodek (2010) Standards for Clinical Documentation and Record Keeping
• Cameron and Turtle‐Song (2002) Learning to Write Case Notes Using the SOAP Format

Watch

I will post a lecture video that you can watch later this week, probably focused on treatment planning.

Weekly Online Discussion Forums

This week, there are five discussion forums for you to engage in. I want you to make a total of six replies across any of the forums. I want at least four of the replies related to any of the prompts. The other reply can be answering prompts or replying to your peers. The following is a brief overview of the forums for this week:

• The forum reflecting on any of the content presented in eight is a place for you to share things you learned, how things could change your practice or areas of further exploration.
• The forum developing a SMAARRT goal is a place for you share some potential goal setting that you might do with clients at your practicum.
• Write a SOAP Note is a forum were I ask you to take work that you are doing with a client in your practicum, and write up documentation in the form of a SOAP note for a meeting you had.
• There are new frontiers in clinical documentation and tools being promoted on social media around using AI and other new technologies in clinical documentation. In this forum I ask you to consider what that might mean and what are some of the benefits or potential challenges related to it.
• There are many potential ethical dilemmas in documentation and the forum asks you to consider what they might be and how we might address them.

While you don’t have to post in all the forums, I expect you to read all the posts across all the forums. Your forums are due before Monday (10/14 at 8 AM).

Midterm Evaluation

Please complete the SOWK 581 (1) Midterm Evaluation. I would love to hear feedback about how this class is going and what I can do to improve your experience.

Unit Resources

Your textbook doesn’t have a dedicated chapter on treatment planning. Mancini (2021) is a chapter on treatment planning using a person-centered context. Your intervention plan for your case study needs to include at least the following: client voice, goal statement, strengths/resources, barriers/obstacles, and tasks or steps. Multiple goals might be discussed, and the interventions should span the micro, mezzo, and macro levels.

In writing treatment plans, we need to consider how we document. Bodek (2010) provides straightforward expectations and best practices for documentation and record-keeping for clinical social workers in New York. While not directed at Washington State, knowing what you should be doing regarding documentation is still valuable. Reamer (2005) provides a similar view of how we write our documentation but from the risk management perspective.

Reamer has a presentation titled Ethics and Risk Management Challenges in Social Work Documentation: A Primer that appears to have been done as part of Webanair at the University of Calgary. It has some interesting and helpful considerations regarding ethics and documentation. I’d encourage students to scroll through his slides and review some of the content there to get their brains going about ethics and documentation.

In one of the forums, I ask you to document your session with a client (changing the identifying information) using a SOAP format (e.g., Subjective Objectives Assessment Plan). In the handouts, you can find Cameron and Turtle-Song (2002) and their article describing how to write SOAP notes. This should give you a good overview of what SOAP notes are. The implementation of how clinicians write SOAP notes is diverse, and they do an adequate job of providing different definitions for how they are often implemented.

Reference

Bodek, H. (2010 February 5) Standards for clinical documentation and record keeping. New York Society for Clinical Social Work. https://www.clinicalsocialwork.org/assets/docs/100206_records.pdf

Cameron, S., & Turtle‐Song, I. (2002). Learning to write case notes using the SOAP format. Journal of Counseling & Development, 80(3), 286-292. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6678.2002.tb00193.x

Mancini, M. A. (2021). Person-centered treatment planning. In Integrated Behavioral Health Practice (pp. 123-153). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59659-0_5

Reamer, F. G. (2005). Documentation in social work: evolving ethical and risk-management standards. Social Work, 50(4), 325-334. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/50.4.325

To-Do Lists

• Read the journal articles and book chapter
• Submit six replies across any of the five forums
• Complete your midterm course evaluation