Across human history, civilizations have responded to disasters and outbreaks of disease with increasingly complex, systematic approaches as a means of organizing chaos and protecting human life. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic provides a unique opportunity to learn from the practice of disaster management and crisis-driven changes to patient care processes in hospital and emergent care environments worldwide. COVID-19 acts as an accelerant for process change and the need for redesign in systems where classical, linear evaluation methods most often inform carefully implemented service improvements. Strikingly, many innovative approaches and valuable lessons come from all over the globe where technology and access to resources have been most limited. This article answers the question, what can we learn about how to respond to future disasters from the evolution of disaster management as performed by helping professionals and policymakers during the past hundred-plus years and best practices seen today?Macro practitioners have co-created unique approaches within several global communities to help cope with COVID-19 and other disasters despite limited resources and seemingly unlimited needs. Referencing existing case studies of patient care responses during COVID-19 in Italy, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States, the authors document innovative practices and use of diverse technologies in local patient care systems. The article concludes by suggesting best practices for designing more robust, adaptive, and crisis ready responses to patient care, as well as the use of developmental evaluation as an agile approach to evaluating and improving patient services. It also suggests roles that helping professionals can play in the translation of big data systems of disaster management from organizations such as the Center for Disease Control, World Health Organization, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and selected think tanks, among others.
In the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, social work education requires a more global approach to graduating better-prepared practitioners. Teaching international social work only based on classroom and second-hand experiences do not expose students to the realities, opportunities, and challenges of work in the field. While there are longer-term volunteering or internship-based field immersion programs, shorter-term collaborations mixing in-class and field learning in international social work education are practiced less. Experiential and project-based courses provide students with opportunities to learn from practitioners, while also providing the reciprocal benefit of time, human, and academic resources of their institution to their partner agencies. This model of education provides aspiring practitioners skills in and models of international collaboration, reducing the risks that learning takes place only at the expense of host communities. The key takeaways of this approach from the experience of students in the course Social Work Practice with Displaced Persons are discussed in this paper. The course provides structured instruction and exposes students to experts in the field of humanitarian response through collaborative projects, field visits, and seminars with practitioners. The analysis of the qualitative data from students’ course reflections shed light on several broad themes on the value of experiential project-based education and the impact of field immersion on the development of essential skills necessary for social workers entering the field of humanitarian response and practice with displaced persons. A case for mainstreaming project-based learning in international social work education to better prepare informed, effective, and efficient practitioners and leaders is presented.
Globalization is the key social, economic, political, and cultural process of our time. This entry defines globalization, summarizes its complex and contradictory correlates and consequences, and offers, from a social work point of view, a balanced assessment of this powerful multidimensional process that is sweeping contemporary world.
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