Population That Social Workers Deal With While In Global Pandemic

Population That Social Workers Deal With While In Global Pandemic

Introduction

According to research, suggestions are that below twenty per cent of the health outcomes such as death rate is influenced by medical care. The prediction shows that over eighty per cent of the health outcomes during a pandemic is as a result of other environmental factors such as housing, food, education and the level of income. Also, factors such as racial discrimination may affect the health outcome rate of a population. These environmental impacts can also be referred to as the social determinants of health and are very important to consider in the event of a health crisis or a pandemic occurring. Social workers are always on the frontline in fighting the epidemic by providing assistance and support to the marginalized communities and individuals. They are not able to social distance themselves either due to poor housing, food shortages and other challenges as earlier stated above. This makes the disease to easily affect the less fortunate population, which in many parts of the world happens to be the majority, especially in the third world countries.

Abstract

In my research, I conducted a thorough case study of how the social workers in Wuhan, the epicentre of the pandemic, to get the details of how social workers responded to the public health hazard that came along with the outbreak of Covid-19. My interest was to establish and come up with the correct data concerning how the social workers in the region gave a hand in mitigating, curbing and containing the pandemic in the efforts of helping their fellow citizens during the pandemic. My focus was mainly on how these social workers engage themselves in assisting the nation and fighting the epidemic as well.

Instrumentation

In the effort to reach at an extensively large number of social workers opinion, duties, responsibilities, target and practices they perform while providing these essential services to the public, I preferred using online sites and questionnaires to get to these social workers and obtain their view together with how they involve themselves in fighting against the pandemic. The reason for using these criteria and methods of collecting this data was to be able to reach out to a large population that would not be biased while giving out their responses. The limitation of this instrumentation process was that I was not in a position to observe whether some the information gave is true or not. The questions in the questionnaire consisted of a mixture of open-ended and closed-ended questions to balance the limits of the answers provided.

Data Collection

On data collection techniques, I prepared an online questionnaire and sent via an email, and it was then broadcasted to all socials workers offices. The questions were simple to understand and direct to the point, which made it easy for the social workers to respond with ease. I didn’t offer any incentives to the social workers as a result of answering the questionnaire, and this helped in ensuring that only the willing parties responded to my survey. Another advantage of using this method is that it was cheaper compared to other methods of data collection.

Data Collection and Analysis

In the questionnaires, I gave out the email that the social workers were to send back their responses to. I aimed to get as many answers that I could use as my sample data to make a knowledgeable conclusion. My plan here analyzes the available sample space that would represent a large population of social workers in my target area.

Results expectation

My intentions and objectives of the above approach are to get the general information and services that the social workers provide to society. My interest in this research is to evaluate how useful and essential is the involvement of social workers in case of a pandemic.

Study Limitations, Ethics, and dissemination

Limitations

The demerits that I encountered in my research was the short duration time frame that the study was to take. Short time may have hindered some social workers from having responded to my questionnaire. Another limitation was that due to my absence in person, the data that I received could be biased in one way or another.

Ethics

During my research, I maintained a high level of confidentiality and information privacy. I achieved this by the fact that people are not entitled or required to include their names in a questionnaire.

Dissemination

Through the issue of a broadcast mail to social workers organizations, I was able to receive a lot of feedback that I used as my sample space of the total population.

Results

After a thorough study of the answers given by the volunteer social workers, it’s evident that in case of a pandemic such as covid-19, social workers provide support and care to the public with very minimal or no bias at all. Social workers provide health education, crisis intervention, emotional support to the community and online screening. These social workers created a community-based intervention model which was implemented by differentially handling cases based on the patient’s risks. They coordinated voluntary programs to provide necessities to local stores and pharmaceutical departments.

Social workers also took the active response to promote the virus prevention and guidance information that relates to Covid-19. The social workers advocated for ways of fighting against the disease, which included social distancing, sanitizing, staying at home and wearing of masks. The social workers also in collaboration with other volunteer organizations and individuals gave out free masks, food donations and sanitizers to the needy majority population who are poor.

Discussion

These active steps by social workers help the less fortunate to be able to stay at home hence observing social distance which in turn supported a lot in containing the pandemic.

The limitation of this involvement of social workers with a large population of both the affected and the infected exposed the social workers to high risks of getting infected with the virus since they are also humans.

Conclusion

From my study, it is evident that social workers play a very significant role in fighting against a pandemic. Other agencies of social workers all over the world should imitate and copy the strategies used by those that have managed to fight and contain a pandemic at any given time. Similar case studies can be done in all other parts of the world where the pandemic is evident.

References

Crampton, A. (2011). Population aging and social work practice with older adults: Demographic and policy challenges. International Social Work, 54(3), 313-329.

Katz, R., & Fischer, J. (2010). The revised international Health Regulations: a framework for global pandemic response. Global health governance, 3(2).

Piggin, J., & Bairner, A. (2016). The global physical inactivity pandemic: an analysis of knowledge production. Sport, education and society, 21(2), 131-147.