Abstract:
Hospital social worker are professionals who are working in hospital dealing with
counselling, discharging plan, referral service, give health education, case management and
the like. In doing the above activities hospital social workers face many challenges, conflict
of interest, lack of resources and budget, case load, lack of proper office and the like. This
study has a general objective of exploring the roles, challenges and coping mechanisms of
hospital social workers and its specific objectives are identifying roles, structural and
professional challenges of hospital social worker and explore possible coping mechanisms of
hospital social workers. Single instrumental qualitative case study research design and
purposive sampling as sampling technique has been employed and the study selects three
public hospitals as study area on professional social workers. As source of data, both primary
and secondary data has be used. From primary source of data, in-depth interview and
observation was applied and document review was applied as a secondary source of data and
it applied thematic analysis to analyses the collected data. According to this research finding.
that the roles of hospital social workers are giving health education, referral services, giving
free medication services, case management and psycho-social assessment, giving counselling
services and legal aid . Challenges of hospital social workers are, lack of budget, lack of
enough and appropriate office, unaware of medical staffs about the roles of hospital social
workers, lack of knowledge about the medical model and drug related issuance. As coping
mechanisms, hospital social workers are using the following mechanisms, give awareness
rising training, used other offices for counselling, creating new organizational linkage, read
about the medical model, using alternative means of material and financial resources and
used personal phone for communication. Finally this research finding has its own
implications for social work practices, education, for hospitals and researches.
