Policy and Advocacy

Adult Protective Services (APS) are empowered by states and local communities to respond to reports and cases of vulnerable adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect. While incorporating legal, medical, and mental health services, APS programs are part of the social services delivery system and incorporate principles and practices of the social work profession.

Alaska Natives represent less than 1% of the U.S. population but reside in more than 229 Native villages and account for 40% of federally recognized tribes. Most Alaska Native communities shared common Euro-American contact experiences: exposure to western religions, education, and disease. Historical trauma contributes to many of the social welfare problems Natives experience today: low educational attainment, unemployment, inadequate health care, substance abuse, and violence. Service delivery mechanisms, lack of cultural appropriateness, and isolation compound these pressing issues. Locally delivered social welfare services that take into account traditional Native worldviews, values, languages, and intergenerational relationships are effective in addressing many of these issues.

Bioethics and biomedical ethics are defined. Common bioethical concepts, exemplary moral values, fundamental ethical principles, general ethical theories, and approaches to moral reasoning are reviewed. The scope of topics and issues, the nature of practice situations in bioethics, and social work roles on organizational bodies that monitor and respond to bioethical issues are summarized, as are trends in bioethics. Practice contexts, from beginning to end of life, are highlighted with biopsychosocial facts, ethical questions and issues, and implications for social work—a profession uniquely positioned in giving bioethics a social context.

This article proposes social equity as a paradigm to guide social work practice and education. “Cultural equity” encompasses the multiplicity of personal, social, and institutional locations that frame identities in therapeutic practice as well as the classroom by locating these complexities within a societal matrix that shapes relationships of power, privilege, and oppression. Foregoing cultural competency for a cultural equity framework requires both analysis and interruption of the “otherizing” process inherited through multicultural discourses and the legacies of colonization. Through the use of education for critical consciousness, accountability through transparency, community-learning circles, progressive coalition-building, and usage of action strategies, transformative potential is revealed across multiple sites, both local as well as global. Multiple illustrations for the coherent application of cultural equity in social work practice and education are offered.

Housing, especially homeownership and affordable housing, remains essential to the American Dream but also among our most challenging social issues, particularly given the collapse of the housing market in the early 21st century. Housing and affordable housing are inextricably linked to both our national economic crisis and our wavering social policies. Housing is both symptomatic of and a catalyst for overarching social and economic issues, such as poverty, economic and educational inequality, and racial disparities, and it remains an unmet need for a significant portion of our population, such as the elderly, disabled, victims of abuse, those aging out of child welfare, veterans, ex-offenders, and others who encounter unique difficulties and lack of supportive services and service coordination. Advancing comprehensive and coordinated housing policies and programs remains important for social work and in the struggle for decent and affordable housing for all.

Since the mid-1980s, managed care has been one approach used to address the economic crisis in the American health-care system. This entry overviews managed care from the perspective of policy, procedure, practice, and system. Specifically, emphasis is given to understanding the emergence and history of managed care, multiple definitions, how it works, and examples of managed care plans, key legislation, existing research, its future, and implications for social-work practitioners.

Throughout history, measuring outcomes has been a goal and priority in the human services. This entry chronicles the history of outcomes measurement in the human services in the United States and discusses present-day outcome measurement activities as well as trends and some of the key areas for outcomes measurement in several human service domains.

Racial disproportionality in out-of-school suspensions (suspensions) is a persistent, multi-level social justice and child well-being issue affecting not only youth, families, and schools but society as a whole. It is a complex, multiple-level social problem that will require an equally complex response. The design of effective remedies will require adequate understanding of the problem as well as the historical and sociocultural contexts in which it emerged and is perpetuated. Progressive educators have offered a number of alternatives to harsh and exclusionary discipline, but research is needed to examine their effectiveness, especially in reducing racial disproportionalities.

The 921 Earthquake in 1999 and Typhoon Morakot in 2009 both brought catastrophic damage to Taiwan. In the aftermath of these two disasters many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social workers collaborated with central and local governments to provide post-disaster relief and reconstruction services. Among these, the most important initiative was the launching of a system for providing post-disaster human services, including counseling, education, employment, social welfare, and health care.