Resources Database

This document looks at strategies to lessen the risk of carer burnout. It briefly reviews the approach developed and used by one faith-based organization to care for its staff and volunteers who work as carers in the community and also with the families of those living with HIV.

A stable and highly-skilled child welfare workforce is necessary to meet the critical needs of vulnerable children and their families. High turnover of child welfare workers is a major contributor to the failure of child welfare organizations to meet state and federal goals. The GAO presents some causes for turnover and the effect it has upon services.

The Isibindi programme, developed by the National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) in 2005, is specifically designed to meet the needs of OVC, their families and communities. This report describes a formative evaluation of the Isibindi programme initiated in mid-2014, two years after the start of the expansion.

Prevalent poverty and related problems in the East African region call for substantial action from various stakeholders, including social workers. This book, based on comprehensive empirical research, portrays an emerging yet powerful profession that has a significant role to play in the endeavour towards social development, social justice, human rights and gender equality. The book is the first of its kind to provide first-hand theoretical and empirical evidence about social work in East Africa.

This manual is for sharing lessons learned from the establishment and implementation of village level child rights promotion mechanisms by various government and non-government actors. The manual provides recommendations on community mobilization and managing ongoing relationships with communities and children.

Summary and regional overview of the social service workforce—with a focus on those engaged in the child protection system— in southeast Europe today

Despite the fact that social work students consistently identify their field placement as having the greatest impact on their learning, research on learning activities used during placement and the impact on practice competency and social work identity is limited. The data were gathered from social work students’ experiences during placement. The findings shows that the more regularly students engaged in learning activities with their social work supervisor, the more likely they were to report a sense of social work identity and feelings of practice competence.

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Research Page focuses on a number of studies that identify challenges to recruitment and retention; provides research and resource information that supports the importance of professional education for child welfare practice; highlights issues related to encouraging social workers to choose child welfare as a career path; and identifies outcomes from agency/university partnerships that affect recruitment and retention difficulties.

Shortage of physicians is a barrier in achieving universal access to HIV care and treatment. In September 2005, a pilot program of nurse-centered antiretroviral treatment (ART) prescription was launched in three of the rural primary health centers in Rwanda. The feasibility and effectiveness of this task-shifting model was evaluated using descriptive data.

The profession of social work has a leadership role in the field of child welfare. Opportunities were provided through public policies allowing schools of social work to recieve Title IV-E funding for professional development of child welfare workers. There are now hundreds of partnerships that spent millions of federal dollars to professionally educate Bachelor of Social Work and Master of Social Work students for careers in child welfare. But there is no research that will evaluate these partnerships’ effectiveness.

The paper is based on an implicit assumption that supervision is carried out in rural areas without taking into consideration the best practices available in scientific literature. They intend to keep an implicit epistemic distance to that assumption. This research was conducted through a constructive Grounded Theory methodology using structured and directive interviews as the main technique.

The article promotes awareness of secondary trauma among child welfare workers. The risk of experiencing burnout and secondary trauma increases when exposed to multiple traumatic events when working with children and families. Engaging in positive coping strategies, such as seeking supervision, attending trainings on secondary trauma, working within a team, balancing caseloads, and work–life balance are methods to negate effects of working with traumatized individuals.  

This report discusses practicums and their important role in many of the professional courses in higher education. This research provides an overview of different ways in which the practicum has been conceptualized, implemented and evaluated in higher education. Findings indicate that whilst the practicum is widely accepted as a valuable and successful component of professional education, it has a number of shortcomings; and the lack of good quality research into the practicum makes it difficult to draw unequivocal conclusions.

This paper exposes students to the ways in which social work and law intersect. Students will explore the judiciary’s contributions to important social policy issues and the knowledge social workers need to effectively participate in the judicial process. It presents basic legal concepts, describes the workings of the court system, and shares strategies for avoiding malpractice. The units that follow cover a variety of topics to give instructor’s options for their course and allow students to study their interests.

The article is an investigation regarding preferences for job characteristics among final year medical, nursing, pharmacy, and laboratory students at select universities in Uganda. Participants were administered a cadre-specific discrete choice experiment that elicited preferences for attributes of potential job postings they were likely to pursue after graduation. Salary, facility quality and manager support were the attributes that affects almost all student-groups’ job posting choice.

The Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are major campaigns on closing gaps on educational disparities. This study (N=124.592) examined the impact of these campaigns over eight years from five sub-Saharan African countries. Findings show that considerable progress has been made to close the disparity based on orphan status, and the gender gap is also closing.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of large group supervision, and combined group and individual supervision with counseling students. Using a pre-test/post-test method, counselors were rated on growth in effectiveness and development according to self-report, supervisor, client, and objective rater responses.

This paper reviews the use of location-allocation models in health service development planning in the developing nations. The purpose of this review is to examine the suitability of these methods for designing health care systems and their relevance to overall development problems in such countries.