Exploring the Roles, Challenges and Coping Mechanisms of Hospital Social Worker: in The Case of Some Selected Public Hospitals in Addis Ababa

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.