Session One:

Description:

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created extreme and excessive demands upon the country’s healthcare systems and healthcare workers across disciplines, leaving them facing demands for service not previously experienced in a non-combat environment. The purpose of this workshop is to help hospice and palliative care social workers:

1. Differentiate between burnout, vicarious trauma, PTSD, and moral injury;
2. Understand the impact of internal storytelling on their ability to regulate their nervous systems in real time; and
3. Foster a sense of common humanity and connection through storytelling as an intervention for coping with difficult thoughts, emotions and spiritual struggles arising in the workplace.

The key component of this workshop is the use of story-healing circles to cultivate connection and foster healing. As human beings our brains are hardwired for story. Evolutionarily speaking, it’s an essential tool for survival that helps us make meaning of our lives, and share our experience with others. Stories matter because they make us believe, expand our imagination and cultivate a sense of belonging by releasing cortisol, dopamine, and oxytocin into the brain, enabling us to empathize with each other and develop compassion, trust and ultimately connection. 

Historically, mental health issues like burnout, vicarious trauma, and moral injury are problems of disconnection that thrive in shame, leaving the people experiencing them to suffer in silence. Story-healing circles provide brave spaces for people to come together in community to bear witness to the stories of others similarly situated to them, fostering a feeling of common humanity and connection. During this workshop, attendees will have time to engage in story-healing circles. For the circles, attendees will have an opportunity to share the story based on a prompt they will receive. The story-healing circles are designed to help participants think about things from a different perspective and feel connection and support from the group.

Understanding internal storytelling cycles and how they relate to self-regulation not only helps attendees address their own basic physiological and safety needs in order to better serve their clients and their families, but it also creates the conditions for their clients and their families to co-regulate their own nervous systems during times of high stress and uncertainty, allowing for greater empathy and connection between the social worker and the people they’re serving.

Session Two:

Description:

This pre-conference workshop will empower social workers as core interdisciplinary team members within a palliative care or hospice team to learn how to integrate pain management as an essential focus of practice.  The presenters will provide a deep look into the historical and current context of pain management with a focus on inequities that contribute to the undertreatment of pain in marginalized populations. This context will be enriched with the addition of the ethical, legal, regulatory and policy aspects which present a menu of opportunities for social workers to intervene as informed clinicians and advocates for both patients and interdisciplinary teams. The speakers will also focus on spoken and written pain related assessment and communication strategies and interventions with the intent to mitigate language and labels that may potentially harm through interactions with the medical team, impacting both the effectiveness of pain treatment and healthcare utilization. At the conclusion, participants will have a deeper understanding of the need for social work assessment and intervention as integral to pain management, and will be empowered to bring back 1-3 calls to action for their medical team. This can include changes to their social work assessment, documentation recommendations for self/interdisciplinary team, educational opportunities for interdisciplinary teams and commitment to further learning and integration of pain related interventions.

Session One:

Description:

This pre-conference workshop will empower social workers to gain self-awareness through expressive writing and mindfulness to acknowledge personal loss history and address compassion fatigue when working with patients/families during end of life and bereavement. The goal is to answer the question: As helpers, how do we hold our personal stories of loss while ethically supporting patients and families? This presentation addresses the ethical standard of self-awareness in social work practice, focusing on compassion fatigue and professional competence in hospice and palliative care. Through an exploration of the concept of the Wounded Healer, research on secondary trauma, and personal grief narrative, attendees will be encouraged to use expressive writing to identify personal feelings, beliefs, and values related to death/grief. Mindfulness-based techniques such as self-compassion, breath work, and gratitude can be effective for both the professional and the patient/family in coping with grief. The experiential nature of the workshop is ideal for professionals with a solid understanding of grief and loss. It is imperative that social workers feel empowered as leaders of the interdisciplinary team, particularly when considering the ethical standard of self-awareness in end of life care. With a high incidence of compassion fatigue in the field, social workers are well-suited to provide support to colleagues and offer strategies for sustaining high quality care. This deep-dive exploration of the layers of loss we experience both personally and professionally uses several interactive exercises to engage attendees and promote integration of skills learned. The following elements will be included to ensure audience engagement in this workshop: expressive writing exercises, small group discussion, mindfulness-based activities (e.g. loving-kindness phrase, five senses grounding meditation).

Session Two:

Description:

When training a new palliative social worker, the presenters were taken aback by her constant note taking during supervision. When queried she replied, “I don’t have a clue about half of the terms you’re using. I go and google them after we meet.” We both remembered our first hospital jobs and doing similar research. Whether you’re a student or a supervisor, this pre-conference session will help you learn the basic biology and terminology related to serious illnesses. Grounded in science, the presenters have developed seven illness guides which assist social workers in addressing the psychosocial and palliative issues social workers confront in clinical settings. You don’t need to be a med student or a nurse to help patients and their families navigate the science behind their diagnosis. Test your knowledge, learn something new and find tools to bring back to your community!                                                                                                                 

As early as 2000, Cristi and Sormanti explored the impact of poorly integrated training related to death and dying and its adverse impact on palliative social workers’ job competency, satisfaction and retention. As participants in a system collaborative of palliative and medical social workers in 2022, the presenters found that little had changed. New social workers and their supervisors bemoaned a dearth of understandable diagnosis related information for social workers.  As beginning palliative social workers, experienced providers, and as educators, we have found that our knowledge of disease-specific information and medical terminology impacted our ability to be effective participants in IDT discussions. Anecdotally, we felt that a social worker’s medical knowledge contributed to their heightened respect and trust among the care team. Given a desire to be both effective members of a patient’s care team and elevate the role of palliative social workers, the presenters identified 7 serious illnesses and developed short guides  (1-4 pages) which were then fact checked by 2 board-certified palliative MDs for accuracy. As the palliative and hospice field focuses on ensuring top of license competencies for social workers through the APCHSW-C exam and research publications, the Serious Illness guides provide a much needed and to date, unavailable resource, for new and experienced social workers, educators and administrators.  These guides can serve as an initial training tool as well as a desk top reference. This symposium will introduce the tool as well as provide feedback regarding needed modifications based on participants’ real time experiences.