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A terminally ill woman was one of the most effective instructors Jennifer Massey had in her social work program.
“This incredible, articulate woman wanted me to learn, and she made me ask her the tough questions about her life and her disease,” said Massey, who received her master’s degree in social work in 2004. “I asked her about her disease, how long she had had it, if she was afraid, what her youth was like, how the world had changed in her lifetime. Getting to know her changed the direction of my career.”
Faculty member Cynthia Forrest was hoping for this type of response from Social Work 762: Loss, Grief, and Social Work Interventions. The course, housed in the College of Social Work, is an elective open to graduate students across academic disciplines. Pairing these students with critically ill patients is an integral part of the course, which Forrest developed and teaches.
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| Cynthia Forrest |
“Students are matched with volunteer mentors through health agencies, and they spend a total of six hours outside of class with their mentor, who is living with a terminal or life-threatening disease,” said Forrest, Center for the Child and Family Studies. “Some mentors volunteer for more than one semester. At the same time, a few mentors die each semester. That is part of the value of this experience for the students and the class.”
To begin the matching process, Forrest contacts social workers in local home health agencies, hospice programs, skilled nursing homes, and senior day care facilities. Those social workers recruit patients to be mentors. “They understand what we are trying to do and they understand what this could mean to social work practice and to their clients,” Forrest said.
“People who volunteer to be mentors have the opportunity to share their experience and to create something meaningful from their illness,” she said. “They can make a real difference when they tell students, ‘This is what it is like for me. These were the good experiences and the not-so-good experiences I’ve had with health care providers.’ ”
The likelihood of a social worker having to respond to end-of-life concerns is high because of the large numbers of people who are living longer with life-threatening illnesses.
“Educationally, we are playing catch-up trying to prepare students for practice with this population,” Forrest said. “Our struggles with creating responsive content reflect our personal and societal struggles to deal with illness, dying, and death.
“So the initial challenge was that the course curriculum had to be created from scratch,” she said. “The greatest challenge was finding some balance between giving students a broad swipe of information and giving them specific information. I needed to find a way to maximize students’ exposure in a 15-week course. That is how the mentor idea became so attractive—the mentors provide real depth to the course.”
Tyra Jefferson took Social Work 762 because someone in her family had recently died.
“I learned a lot about end-of-life care by seeing it from someone else’s point of view,” said Jefferson, who is now a social worker with the Columbia Housing Authority. “My mentor was an elderly man in a senior care day facility. From him, I learned how to communicate my feelings toward someone who is terminally ill, like what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. You certainly don’t say, ‘I know how you’re feeling.’ To say this to someone with a life-threatening illness can be devastating to them.”
For Jefferson, the most helpful part of the course was spending two class periods with second-year medical students.
“Together, we attended a lecture on interdisciplinary approaches to end-of-life care and we listened to a panel of experts talk about the topic,” Jefferson said. “Then we broke into small groups and practiced an interdisciplinary interview with a volunteer patient from the VA hospital who came in and role-played a situation.
“That was a great learning experience,” she said. “There was a social worker and a doctor involved in the role-play, and the students saw that the doctor wanted to go right to the solution while the social worker wanted to empower the patient and get them to help in their own care. It really showed the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach.”
As for Massey, the social work student whose mentor had such an impact on her career, she is now a social worker with the Carolinas Community Hospice. She visits clients and their families, educates them about the disease process, and helps them learn to cope with their grief.
“I work with a team of nurses, chaplains, and hospice-certified nursing assistants,” she said. “My job is to make sure the families are talking about what is coming in the end. I assess and determine the needs of the client and the family. I help them make funeral arrangements and make sure other end-of-life issues are being taken care of.
“Before I ever elected to take the mentor course, I thought it was an important component of learning to deal with end-of-life issues on a more global scale,” Massey said. “I just didn’t know it would take me into a career in hospice work.”
10/05
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