The Role of the Hospice Social Worker

When our Angela Hospice social workers first meet with patients and families, it’s not uncommon to hear, “Why does a social worker need to come see us?”

There can be misconceptions about the role of the hospice social worker, but they’re an important part of the hospice interdisciplinary team.

 

What is the role of the hospice social worker?

“A hospice social worker is essential in supporting the emotional, psychosocial, and practical needs of patients and families at end of life,” explained Whitney Holden, a social worker and Clinical Manager for Angela Hospice. “They help individuals process grief, navigate complex family dynamics, connect with community resources, clarify goals of care, and ensure the patient’s wishes are honored…and so much more!”

You might think of it this way: if the nurse’s job is to address a patient’s physical pain and discomfort; the social worker’s role is to address emotional pain — as well as sorting out a lot of logistics that can feel overwhelming to handle on your own.

 

What does look like from the patient and family point of view?

“We come in and try and get some understanding of the family, what their needs may be,” said Tess Janoch, a social worker for Angela Hospice’s Home Hospice program. “I find in my first visit, there are many things that people are surprised that I can help with…things that they never even thought about.”

Lead Social Worker Kelly Kovach-Collicott likes to summarize those needs with the six Fs:

• Family

Social workers can help by making sure everyone is on the same page, and facilitating conversations that could be awkward to navigate on your own.

• Feelings

Experiencing illness and loss is challenging emotional work. Hospice social workers are there to listen and offer support for patients and families.

• Finances

Are there barriers preventing the patient’s needs from being met? Social workers can find resources to help.

• Facilities

Is the patient in the right place, somewhere they feel safe and comfortable? Social workers can assist with finding placement if needed, or helping to make the environment more suitable.

• Forms

Social workers can provide invaluable help in completing paperwork for Medicaid, Family Medical Leave, and all sorts of other needs.

• Funerals

It can be difficult to talk about final arrangements, but advance planning and knowing everything is in order can decrease the amount of stress that family and loved ones experience. Social workers can help the family navigate this process.

 

“We do have a pretty extensive understanding of coping skills and strategies that we can use, even in really short-term situations, to help people get through these really hard emotional things,” explained Tess.

Kelly said social workers use “creative thinking, helping make a situation the best it can be.” She said social workers are “constantly looking at the dynamics of a situation. Does the patient want anything about that to be different? And if so, what can we do to affect that?”

Advocating on behalf of the patient and their family is an important part of the hospice social worker’s role, and so is walking alongside them.

“We answer a lot about what to expect, a lot about what’s happening,” Kelly said.

Having a social worker to talk to makes a huge difference for patients, and their families as well. Caregiving is hard work, and the help and encouragement from the social worker and the hospice team can bring relief.

 

What makes a good hospice social worker?

Angela Hospice social worker have master’s level degrees, but it takes compassion and a desire to help others as well, Kelly said. That desire is what spurred her to leave the corporate world and pursue social work instead: she wanted to do something that made an impact. An internship showed her that hospice was something meaningful she could do.

“It can be intense,” Kelly said. “You know, people are dying and people who care about them are watching them die. And so we have to be able to handle that and be able to make it about the patients and families, and not about ourselves.”

For Tess, having experienced profound loss while she was young, she knew she wanted to work in hospice. Tess knows that if there had been a hospice social worker to help her at that time, it would have made a world of difference.

“I can see a lot of ways that my life might have gone differently had there been a ‘me’ involved helping my family and figuring things out,” Tess reflected.

She knows now that she is able to make an impact on families going through difficult times. Standing by them is a big part of that.

“I am continually surprised at the amount of gratitude family members express for me standing next to them and walking beside them in their hospice journey, even if I can’t help them find the solutions they are looking for. They are so grateful and relieved that they didn’t have to try and figure everything out alone,” Tess said. “And I think they feel a lot more confident that they did everything they could.”

 

The big picture

Social workers are an important piece in the puzzle that makes up the hospice team. Hospice is about caring for the whole person: physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.

“Social work, by the things that we explore and assess,” Kelly explained, “helps pull the whole picture together.”