Job Abstract

The Palliative Care Social Worker (PCSW) functions as a trans-disciplinary team member of the Palliative Care Program that provides comprehensive psychosocial care to patients with serious and life-limiting medical conditions. Provide clinical Palliative Care assessments and recommendations, assess and counsel patients and families experiencing severe emotional distress, facilitate and coordinate and when appropriate lead goals of care meetings, including advance care planning/advance directive completion assistance, perform general hospice conversations and referrals. Provide case-management. Conduct basic pain assessments and basic spiritual suffering assessments and when appropriate refer to providers for further evaluation. Participate in program development as required.

Salary range: $48.03/hr - $57.40/hr

Required:

• Master’s degree in Social Work.
• Knowledge of psychosocial and other rehabilitation related problems that arise in individuals with complex conditions at all phases of their disease and treatments.
• Knowledge of psychosocial distress screening instruments. Ability to formulate assessments of psychosocial needs of individuals with complex conditions and frequent hospitalizations. Ability to put these skills to use.
• Skills and knowledge to deliver psychosocial interventions in a medical setting.
• Skills required to facilitate individual, group and family therapy interventions.
• Skill in using computer database software to maintain and update resource referral network, all patient tracking, rehabilitation needs using software such as an Electronic Medical Record such as CareConnect with appropriate class work.
• Ability to identify referral sources and to provide referrals for economic, psychosocial and home health care programs.
• Knowledge and ability to function as a team member, working with other staff social workers and clinicians to develop patient groups, lectures and other programs.
• Experience working as a liaison with inpatient/outpatient units and community agencies.
• Skill in completing and entering patient notes, tracking forms and consultation notes at appropriate intervals into database.
• Ability to understand the mission of the Program and to implement its objectives for the delivery of patient care.
• Ability to function as a team member.
• Ability to adapt to changing priorities including seeing patients at multiple sites, under various conditions, without a specific office.
• Ability to synthesize ideas to solve problems.
• Interpersonal skills to interact effectively with patients and medical staff including physicians and nurses to function as a team member.
• Ability to convey warmth and caring in interpersonal interactions with patients and other members of the team.
• Knowledge of IBM-compatible computers -facility with Windows and the Internet.
• Demonstrated ability in searching the Internet and in determining appropriateness of medical information found on the Internet for patient use.
• Ability to provide clinical knowledge to less experienced clinicians including developing didactic trainings, evaluating students, field instructor accreditation.

Preferred:

• Experience and knowledge working with medical patients in outpatient and/or inpatient medical environments
• Knowledge of bereavement process.
• Knowledge, skill and ability to work autonomously using specific software programs such as Word, Excel, Outlook and any other programs for EMR.
• Familiarity with CareConnect or other EPIC-based electronic medical record software.