Discuss The Challenges And Opportunities For Social Workers

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Social workers are practicing professionals promoting social change and development, social cohesion, and empowerment of people. They are trained personnel who carry out actions with the aim of alleviating the conditions of those human beings who are suffering from social deprivation and belong to different communities. Professionals performing social activities work with and for different age groups, different genders, and various agendas. Social workers working with older people and older adult groups have to adopt different styles of performing their duties and behave more cautiously to provide them with exactly what they want and how they want things.

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Every human being holds some basic rights that are the same for everyone without discriminating over age, gender, or any other basis (Rothman, 2018). Also, human beings have different needs and deserve quality life. Older adults have equal rights like others in society, and they too have their personal wants, which they wish to fulfill to survive and live a quality life. These needs can be defined by some domains, such as:

Material well-being: This includes basic needs like reasonable accommodation and sufficient money to survive and maintain standard comfort. These are very essential for survival and living an easy life every day.

Social inclusion: It includes their wish or desire to be accepted socially by different communities and segments of the population. They wish to contribute their part to society by supporting it.

Interpersonal relationship: This domain is about their contact with their family. Older adults need to be in regular contact with their family members and friends to live a good quality life. These relationships will fill them with love and emotions, which enables them to be happy and satisfied.

Social workers play several tasks with older people to provide them comfort and help them to spend quality life. Professionals performing social work for aging people are known as gerontological or geriatric social workers (Qualls, 2016). They coordinate the care of elderly people in a wide variety of settings, like hospitals, health care facilities, and daytime health care. They perform different roles for and on behalf of old people, such as acting as their advocates in outpatient settings, providing emotional, mental, and social support when they need it, and many more.

As professionals perform their actions, many obstacles come their way, specifically while working with and for older adults. These challenges hinder the motive of social professionals to improve the living standards of people facing social deprivation. Along with challenges, social workers also get better opportunities for enhancing their service level and for the betterment of both the older people they are serving and themselves in their careers and attainment of their objectives. All these barriers and new chances that come in the way of social workers are mentioned below and thoroughly discussed in the next paragraphs.

Challenges social workers face while working with older adults

Understanding the requirements: As the age of a human being increases, their nature, behavior, and needs change. The main challenge social workers face while working with older people is understanding them, how they behave, and what exactly they want (Coulourides, Kogan, Wilber, and Mosqueda, 2016). Older people are moody and considered children; they need to be taken care of and have different wants. To manage their basic needs, workers have to interact with them, evaluate their behavior, and accordingly understand their needs. This thorough analysis will work as a guide for social professionals to perform their actions. However, they are not sure if the activities they are performing will help satisfy the wants of elderly people, as by aging, their wants and satisfaction levels regularly change, which is a challenge. Social worker's plans and actions have to be flexible so that they can modify them accordingly.

Allocating resources: aging comes with lots and lots of health problems, which are sometimes severe and involve huge resources. Nowadays, health checkups and medical treatments are very expensive. Older people who belong to the lower social section cannot afford it, or people who are left by their families and living in old age homes also cannot take expensive medical treatments. Therefore, money is the most important resource for social workers and one challenge to arrange huge finances (Tsai, Shillair, and Cotten, 2017). They get their funds from different sources, like donations, raising awareness in public, or making arrangements with big organisations. Next, a barrier comes after money is allocated, and then difficulty comes in managing the health of old people. They need to be taken care of every time they are kids. To do so, caretakers or nurses need to be appointed, which is another very troublesome task. Social workers have to search a lot for volunteers who are ready to do such work for elderly people.

Managing family conflicts: Social workers are professionals working for different people and handling several problems of their clients. Sometimes families get involved in the work of social workers. Managing family members and their conflicts becomes an issue for professionals and challenging as well. Professionals have to build strong relations with family members; they have to understand them and then perform tasks. There are times when families do not treat their elders properly and any intervention of social workers creates problems. They put legal charges on institutions and social workers who were handling and working in order to keep the rights of old people intact. These legal cases take a lot of time and money to resolve, and that is a huge difficulty for social workers (Greene, 2017). Professionals have to put forth efforts that are not in favor of their aims; these are the waste of their time, efforts, and skills. Their main motive is to serve others, and due to a few problems, they get misspelled from their path and objectives.

Conflict of interest: Sometimes conflicts between professionals and their clients can also arise. These conflicts depend on the ethical responsibilities of social workers and the requirements of the elders. For example, a client has a very severe disease that has to be cured as it is a life-or-death situation. However, the person denies taking treatments or informing their family members. In this case, the responsibility of the social worker is to make sure that the family is well informed about the condition of the client and also to be obedient to what the client says. This is a challenging situation where, for a social worker, conflicts arise between his ethical duties and the aim of providing what exactly is asked by an older adult.

Opportunities social workers get while working with older adults

Building long-term relations: Social work is an activity people undertake to serve others with the common objective of providing those people ease and comfort who need it and cannot afford it due to any reason. This is a selfless act that is performed by professionals but needs help from others too. One person cannot do good or bring change, and that is why the more people get involved, the more people are served and provided ease. In the case of serving elder institutions, social working organisations or professionals need people with them, and they are known as volunteers (Hafford-Letchfield, 2016). These persons join hands with the same objective of serving people without any expectations of earning any other benefits. This is an opportunity for social workers to bring more people with them, helping them attain their aims and serving the maximum number of people who are in need. The aim of maintaining long-term relations with the volunteers can benefit the company, and they can be called every time the company needs them.

Enhance their expertise. Social workers deal with many different situations and with many people on a daily basis. They have to interact with several human beings on a regular basis to perform their tasks and duties. They also perform various roles in serving their clients and the people who need them according to their needs. Sometimes they work as advocates for someone; on the other hand, they educate others and spread awareness in public, which relates to their social work actions. All these different roles they perform and the knowledge they gather from these actions will enhance their skills (Pitt-Catsouphes et. al., 2017). This knowledge gained by social workers enables them to increase their expertise and develop more effective manners to help and serve the public. This is a growth opportunity for every social professional, which enables them to learn new things with every passing day. As their expertise increases and better skills are developed, it helps in influencing more people and attracting more and more experts with their cause of helping older adults.

Identifying needs of people: The older generation is the most experienced segment of the population, as they have lived their lives. Elder people have seen all the ups and downs in their lives, and their knowledge is considered an intangible asset for social workers. Professionals associated with older generations and who work for them get to learn new things and life lessons from them. These are the additional benefits they get in return for the services and activities they perform for them. All the lessons they get from their clients help them to understand them better and make a good analysis of people in the world. They develop better understanding and analytical skills, which enable them to study human behavior and the ways they will react. A better understanding of humans, their needs, their behavior, and trends will give opportunities to social workers to perform better. It helps them achieve their aims and reach new heights. By doing so, they can actually serve and render their efforts in a better manner to people, helping more and more individuals along with older adults.

Social work is one profession that is selfless and in which no one expects any financial benefits. While doing social work, an individual has to be very strong mentally, and on top of that, they have to be very strong emotionally (Challis et al., 2016; Dustin, D., 2016). They are going to face some challenges, which are mentioned above, and they have to be very strong and patient while facing them. Not just challenges but social workers will also gain some opportunities by which they can actually develop themselves and it enables them to achieve their aims in better form. These opportunities and chances will help them to learn new things that will serve as their rewards and appreciation for doing something good for society.

CONCLUSION

The essay above is about social workers working for older adults; these individuals are known as gerontological or geriatric social workers. They are the ones working to serve older adults and giving them comfort and ease they cannot afford or cannot get without somebody's help. Every human being has some basic right, and so as older adults, social professionals assist them in gaining advantage of those rights and fulfilling their needs. They perform different actions and activities in order to help older people live a comfortable life. Many challenges and barriers are faced by them while doing their work and serving people, which they had to move forward with keeping themselves strong. New opportunities and new doors also open for them, which enhance their skills and expertise. They even develop more knowledge and learn new lessons every day, which acts as their reward.

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