Pros
The work can be very meaningful. Direct care colleagues are caring, dedicated, and supportive of one another. Many our highly collaborative. Patients would receive excellent care if staffing ratios were manageable. Pay is adequate.
Cons
Management fundamentally does not understand what social workers or chaplains do. They have taken a sharp turn towards prioritizing quantity over quality, emphasizing taking in more patients versus caring for those already on service. Caseloads are frequently over 70 patients with no are about the proportion of high needs patients or travel distance. Social workers end up having to triage, often going months without seeing a patient because of the impossibility of the caseload. They have opted for a low-budget documentation system that is so awful that they require social workers to maintain a spreadsheet to track patients and visits because their own system cannot do it. We received 4 hours of training when they switched systems. No body knew how to do anything and patient care suffered. They have access to hundreds of direct care staff who would be more than happy to share what our patients need and what would streamline our jobs but not only do they not ask us, they actively rebuke any bottom up suggestions. On call is required and is a bear. They recently outsourced their on call to an agency somewhere else in the country. Many of us stopped feeling like we could tell patients that there is 24/7 support because of the poor quality of after hours support. Additionally, they do not know where they are sending us in the middle of the night and are not checking in to make sure we are OK. The expectations are impossible given the lack of support, poor tools and fundamental lack of understanding of our work. It's not possible to get things done in the 40 hours but you are required to do extensive documenting if you go overtime. Some workers do not put in their overtime, which is the result of this culture. They prefer meeting industry standards (e.g. those poor standards our money hungry for-profit agencies set) rather than best practices (see caseload size). Additionally, they believe that nurses can manage social workers and chaplains even though those same nurses express concerns about their incompetence. Just run far away.