Jacob Campbell

Jacob Campbell

School social worker practicing with students with EBD, university adjunct faculty, PhD student, Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, father, husband, and active community member

Fall 2025 SOWK 581 Class 07 Weekly Email

Email sent on to SOWK 581

SOWK 581 Class Header

Keep an eye out on your email from IT about myheritage and when it is fixed. In the mean time, I’ve included the forums as text so you can be thinking about your replies you will make.

Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week seven is an asynchronous week, during which we will focus on learning about treatment planning and documentation. We don’t have reading from the textbook, but I have several supplementary sources for you to review on how we engage in treatment planning from a person-centered perspective (Mancini, 2021). The ethical (Reamer, 2005) and practical considerations (Bodek, 2010) are explored. A specific focus on SOAP Notes from Cameron and Turtle-Song (2002) is also shared. There are forums for students to reflect on the content, share examples of notes and goals that you might have with clients in your practicum setting, and consider technology and other ethical considerations. My lecture video shares an example of a treatment plan and discusses how it is implemented into practice. The agenda for the lecture video includes:

  • Week Seven Activities
  • Basics of Service Plan Creation
  • Example of a Treatment Plan

The Learning objectives for this week include:

  • Develop an understanding of how a treatment plan is used in practice
  • Identify the components of a treatment plan and learn from a practical example
  • Demonstrate the ability to write a SMAARRT goal and a SOAP note
  • Reflect on the ethics around documentation

Unit Assignments

Content

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

Weekly Online Discussion Forums

The expectation is that each of your replies will be substantive and provide meaningful perspectives, contributing to the forum’s conversation and scholarship. They can be related to the prompts or building on conversations shared by peers. There are four forums for this week, and you are expected to make at least five replies1 across any of the forums. These forums include the following:

  • The forum reflecting on any of the content presented in seven2 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.

Midterm Evaluation

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

Reflecting on Week Seven’s Content

I’ve assigned you to read a lot of content this week. You will read about treatment planning and ethics related to documentation. In this forum, you can discuss anything related to this content:

  • What are some things that stood out for you or that you learned?
  • What are some practices that you will implement in your practice because of this?
  • What is an area you need to look into further regarding these?

Developing a SMAARRT Goal

Adams and Grieder (2014, as cited in Mancini, 2021) describe an expanded version of SMART Goals. These are defined as:

Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Achievable
Relevant
Recovery-Oriented
Time-Limited

In this forum, you can take a client you are working with (or a fictional one). Provide some background needs, and share an example SMAARRT goal for them.

Reference

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

Write a SOAP Note

Writing a SOAP Note is a standard form of documentation. There are several ways that people conceptualize what to put in the sections, but Cameron and Turtle-Song (2002) provide some good definitions of what this might look like. Sometimes it is written in-line:

(S) Content shared in the subjective section. (O) Content shared in the objective section. (A) Content shared in the assessment. (P) Content in the plan section.

I often start with the objective and then go back from notes I took during the sessions (I would do my notes at the end of the day most days). Writing out the session’s objective parts helped me frame and consider the subjective section. Finally, I’d include any relevant assessment (my notes mainly focused on things that were more irregular or weren’t noted (at least in most progress notes) and plan section). The following shows the SOAP notes listed as sections and includes the content I would include in general content. So that you know, the bullet points below are meant to give you an idea of the types of information I would share. It would be written out as sentences.

Subjective

The descriptive content that the client shared is based on the main points/themes described in the objective section. It might be interspersed with quote snippets or quoted words.

Objective

  • Basics of the sessions (e.g., who was present, where the session took place, and the type of session)
  • Main points or themes discussed during the session
  • Interventions or framing that took place during the session
  • Tasks or activities we did

Assessment

  • General presentation and engagement of the client (often, it was about them being oriented times four and their level of engagement/cooperation)
  • Anything in the mental status exam content that was atypical or noteworthy

Plan

  • Continuing with service, next steps, or action items that need to be done by either myself or the client

In this forum, I’d like students to take a recent interaction with one of your clients and write it up as a SOAP note. Don’t include identifying information about the client and change their name. The reading you did with Bodek (2010) and Reamer (2005) can provide some context of what goes into documentation and some consideration for your writing style.

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

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

AI and Other New Technologies in Clinical Documentation

I keep seeing a couple of companies on social media looking at using AI to review your sessions and provide documentation. This is interesting, but I also find it a concerning direction. One example is Mentalyc - AI Psychotherapy Progress Notes. What might be some of this service’s benefits or potential negative aspects? What do you think about something like this in your practice and why? One consideration to take into account is that it is a very uncommon practice to have records or entire sessions recorded. What happens if you get subpoenaed and are required to submit entire session transcripts or if insurance companies use a tool like this to provide authorization for insurance claims?

Ethical Dilemmas in Documentation

Bodek (2010) and Reamer (2005) discuss the ethics and potential ethical dilemmas related to documentation. In this forum, I’d like for students to respond to any of the following prompts:

  • What ethical dilemmas do we face in our documentation, and how do we respond to those?
  • How can we be culturally sensitive and accurate in our documentation without imposing our biases?
  • How can documentation be harmful, and how can we minimize any potential harm in our documentation?

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

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

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 (and your assessment), 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.

All of the presentations for this class can be found at https://presentations.jacobrcampbell.com. This week’s slides are Fall 2025 SOWK 581 Week 07 - Treatment Planning.

The Lecture Videos tab in the MyHeritage course is where you will be able to find class recordings. The video this week is at Fall 2025 SOWK 581 Week 07.

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 List

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

  1. Knowing that MyHeritage is on the fritz and everybody wanting extra time as you work on your assessment it is six replies this week. ↩

  2. Please note that each of the links in this list don’t work currently. I have my forums developed, but the and for the time being I’m including them here the body of the section so you can see the content you will be responding to this week. Because MyHeritage isn’t working I can’t make them forums. I’m hoping it gets fixed soon and will likely update this page removing the actual forums text. ↩

Updated:

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