Social work intervention and management of indigent patients in government hospitals in Cross River State, Nigeria
Keywords:
Social work practice, indigent Patient, management, government hospitalAbstract
Social work intervention involves the deliberate acts and processes of helping clients to achieve a functional state and to meet their needs. The services social workers render consist of assessing, diagnosing, caring for, and solving the various problems of patients or clients assigned to them. Social workers also help clients rebuild skills, cope with social situations, and reduce distress in everyday life. It is more worrisome that indigent patients in a health facility are neglected or abandoned by health practitioners such as doctors, and nurses just because of the unavailability of medical social workers. For this reason, they fail to provide optimum responses that would enable indigent persons to live meaningful existence and be socially functioning in society. This paper uses quantitative analysis and secondary data to examine the management of indigent patients and the place of the social work profession as a moving force in social engineering to help indigent patients achieve a balance. Data were collected through the administration of questionnaires and presented using frequencies and descriptive statistics. The results of the study revealed that social work advocacy, rehabilitation, counselling, and referrals have a significant influence on the management of indigent patients in CRS. The paper concludes that among indigent patients in government hospitals in Cross River States, social work practice has played enormous roles in their lives through advocacy, social work rehabilitation, social work counselling, and social work referral. The study therefore recommends among others that the governments of Cross River State should intensify efforts to ensure that social work advocacy service is well entrenched in all government hospitals so that the majority of patients including indigent patients will access and benefit from the services.Downloads
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