This book provides a multidisciplinary compendium of research pertaining to aging among diverse racial and ethnic populations in the United States. It focuses on paramount public health, social, behavioral, and biological concerns as they relate to the needs of older minorities. The book is divided into four parts covering psychology, public health/biology, social work, and sociology of minority gang. The book focuses on the needs of four major race and ethnic groups: Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, black/African American, and Native American. It also includes both inter- and intra-race and ethnic group research for insights regarding minority aging. The chapters focus on an array of subject areas that are recognized as being critical to understanding the well-being of minority elders. These include psychology (cognition, stress, mental health, personality, sexuality, religion, neuroscience, discrimination); medicine/nursing/public health (mortality and morbidity, disability, health disparities, long-term care, genetics, nutritional status, health interventions, physical functioning); social work (aging, caregiving, housing, social services, end-of-life care); and sociology (Medicare, socioeconomic status (SES), work and retirement, social networks, context/neighborhood, ethnography, gender, demographics).

Social work has a long-standing commitment to healthcare and the recognition of the inextricable link to quality of life and well-being across the lifespan. This book emphasizes the critical importance of health for all members of society and the significant role of social work in the field. It presents essential information about health and social work critical to understanding today’s complex health care systems and policies. The book is intended as a core text for masters of social work (MSW) and advanced bachelor of social work (BSW) courses on health and social work, social work and health care, health and wellness, social work practice in health care, and integrative behavioral health taught in social work, public health, and gerontology. The book is organized into three parts containing 18 chapters. The first chapter describes the role of social work in healthcare. The second chapter discusses ethics and values in healthcare social work. The next three chapters present social determinants of health, intersectionality, and social work assessment. Chapter six discusses health promotion and public health. Chapter seven presents integrated behavioral healthcare. Chapter eight describes substance misuse, abuse, and substance-related disorders. Chapters nine and ten discuss palliative care, end-of-life care, correctional healthcare, and psychosocial care. Chapter 11 describes children and family health. Chapter 12 explores healthcare and work with older adults and their caregivers. Chapters 13 to 15 delve on immigrants and refugee health, health and HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ health. Chapters 16 and 17 describe healthcare and disability, and healthcare and serving veterans. The final chapter discusses future direction of healthcare and social work.

This book provides innovative ways to incorporate aging content into courses, trainings, and workshops for students or professionals. It presents activities which offer hands-on approaches to engage students of all backgrounds–from social workers to family caregivers, medical students to demographers, nurses to community planners, personal care attendants to students in introduction to gerontology courses. These faculty-tested, peer-reviewed educational activities cover topics ranging from physical aging, media, and demographic portrayals of older adults to disaster planning, public policy, and diversity among older adults. The book includes 32 unique and interesting activities. Each activity comes with detailed instructions, basic back-ground information, a materials list, and an explanation of how the specific content aligns with one or more of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE) competencies for undergraduate and graduate education in gerontology. The book is divide into eleven chapters. The first chapter explores teaching courses on aging, and the potential of experiential learning activities to engage students. The second chapter discusses ageism and aging in the media. The next four chapters talk about dementia, demography, health care, and housing for older adults. The seventh chapter describes physical aging. Chapter 8 analyzes public policy and aging. Chapter 9 describes positive interactions with older adults. Chapter 10 explains research projects and papers, and the final chapter discusses spirituality.

Death and Dying courses in social work; nursing; counseling psychology; and medicine traditionally focused on topics such as the experience of dying; the delivery of health care during the end of life; and the experience of mourning after a death. The book includes neurobiological aspects of development and grieving for the students to understand these aspects of biology if they are to claim a bio-psycho-social-spiritual perspective in the 21st century. It talks about the spiritual development in each life phase and also on the special considerations in risk and resilience to describe aspects of marginalization that may affect development. The book explains the factors that promote resilience; maintaining our strengths-based approach to all of this material. It continues with the identification of maturational losses; incorporating these non-death losses into a section renamed living losses found in each life phase chapter. The book defines the chapters by developmental tasks that are tackled at more or less predictable ages to which the chapters are loosely bound. It reviews research on specific responses to loss situations and discuss intervention strategies supported by practice wisdom and empirical research. The book has ancillary materials available to qualified instructors that include outlines; PowerPoint; and activities for each chapter as well as the readings from the earlier editions. This edition of the book will help each reader feel prepared to help grievers of all ages and types.

This fourth edition of the book covers basic and advanced concepts related to the delivery of social work services in health care settings. When health care is responsive to those in need, the provision of services must be equitable, safe, timely, efficient, effective, evidence-based, and patient-centered while simultaneously exemplifying best practices for all. As pressure for quality services continues to increase, however, the equitable distribution and availability of affordable health care has changed. This has left many providers and patients alike filled with expectation and speculation as to what constitutes essential health care service delivery. The book advocates a proactive stance for health care social workers and is designed to serve as a practical guide for understanding and addressing the philosophy of practice in our current health care environment. Suggestions are made for achieving ethical time-limited, evidence-based social work practice in these settings. At the end of each chapter, a “Summary and Future Directions” section is provided that will help social workers to understand what can be expected and how to prepare for the practice changes needed in order to remain viable clinical practitioners. The book is designed as a practical guide to help social workers understand the roots of social work practice, stressing the importance of the person-in-environment and person-in-situation while utilizing strength’s perspective employing this information as a foundation for embracing the changes to come. As a skilled professional, the incorporation of evidence-based social work practice will need to serve as the cornerstone of all we do while always taking into account the uniqueness and situation-based strategy needed to help each individual patient/client/consumer.

This book highlights the enormity of the problems of child maltreatment and their relationship to poverty and other social ills. The first chapter introduces the reader to the issues that impact children, such as poverty, lack of education, and myriad other problems of child maltreatment including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect; as well as parental substance abuse and mental health problems. This is followed by a chapter that presents the private efforts to provide services to abused and neglected children that have transitioned through the years into significantly greater governmental roles. Chapter 3 addresses the fact that the majority of families known to the child welfare system live in poverty, and examines the relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect, and the increased risk of coming into contact with child protection agencies. While the fourth chapter discusses relationship between the educational system and the child welfare system, the fifth and sixth examine the health issues of families known to child protection agencies, and children in the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system referred to as “crossover” or “dual status” youth. The court system plays a critical role in foster care. Adoption from child welfare agencies typically occurs after foster care placement when it becomes apparent that birth parents will be unable to reunite with their children. It can be extremely traumatic for birth parents to lose their children to the foster care system, and then to adoption.

The issues evoked by an aging world pose new challenges with regard to employment, health, retirement, families, and the economy. Societies respond to these challenges in varying ways and these responses can be subsumed under the rubric of social policies. Human rights apply to everyone; they do not diminish with age. This book discusses many of the key issues and concerns confronting older adults in the United States and the policies formulated to deal with them. The ways in which these policies reflect human rights is key in each chapter. The first chapter presents the background on social policy and human rights and how they pertain to and impact older adults. The second chapter focuses on the Older Americans Act (OAA), the foundation of aging policy in the United States, as well as on the federal government involvement by discussing the White Housing conferences on aging. While the third chapter addresses economic supports for older adults, the fourth chapter examines policies associated with liberty and security. The fifth and sixth chapters discuss physical and mental health, and focus on employment and the workplace. This is followed by a discussion on the social policy and the family and by examining how policy relates to vulnerable populations of older adults. The penultimate chapter of the book explores the ways in which various countries are developing policies for their older population and how these reflect human rights. The last chapter looks at the future policy challenges that must be met in order to ensure that rights of older adults are addressed.

This book is part of the Critical Topics in an Aging Society series. It serves as a catalyst in the technological transformation of aging services through organized presentation and evaluation of tools for a broad health care audience. Geriatrics interprofessional care is a fundamental part of older adult clinical practice modeled on a team approach inclusive of various fields, among them social work, pharmacy, nursing, rehabilitation, administration, and medicine. All clinicians who treat older adults, from the independent to the frail, are engaged in geriatrics team care which is continually adapting and evolving for individuals based on functional status changes, new treatment paradigms, and different settings of care. The need for advanced technology is clearly evident as one enters a hospital, nursing home, or geriatric care setting, including the patient’s home. Older adults have limited abilities to adapt to changes across these care locations, and thoughtfully implemented technology may eliminate these obstacles while providing safer, more enjoyable, and cost-effective care. The book presents some of the latest medical technological innovations and discusses options to help improve not only transitions of care, but also independence and quality of life for older adults. It is organized into four sections. The first section discusses current major challenges in aging and targets for technology, and promoting technology adoption and engagement in aging. The second section focuses on transitions of care and technology integration, home telehealth, and telemedicine and its effects on elder care in rural areas. Section three explores technology design for frailty, technology and cognitive impairment, advances in medication adherence technology, and technological advancements in pain management in elderly population. The final section describes personalized medicine and wearable devices, social robots and other relational agents to improve patient care, artificial intelligence and its potential to improve health, and advances in health education technology.

Psychological trauma can occur when a person experiences an extreme stressor that negatively affects his or her emotional or physical well-being. This book encompasses theories, diagnosis, and treatment as well as how trauma affects family members and caregivers. It also addresses the variables of gender, race/ethnicity, and culture as they bear on trauma psychology and the potential health consequences of trauma. In addition, the book illuminates controversies in the field and such emerging topics as posttraumatic growth (PTG), multiple traumas, and how traumatic events affect communities. A person could be diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) only if he or she experienced a criterion A stressor, which comprises two components: the person experienced, witnessed events that involved actual threatened death/serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self/others, and the person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Given the serious often life-threatening conditions that trauma survivors often have, an adequate health care system response is perhaps the most pressing need of survivors of traumatic events. Children of parents with PTSD often describe damaged, preoccupied parents who are emotionally limited. Self-care is critical when someone works with clients or patients who have experienced trauma. Burnout is possible, as are compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress. Evidence-based treatments for PTSD can be cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions, such as prolonged exposure therapy, cognitive processing therapy (CPT), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). The book also deals with alternative medicine treatments such as meditation and dance therapy and movement.

This book provides health care professionals with the essential preparation towards translation of health care policy aims and structure into realities of patient care and community health needs. It provides the background knowledge, frameworks, and principles through which the adequacy of alternative health care system financing strategies can be analyzed. The book is divided into eight chapters. The book begins with a primer on alternative theories of social justice and their implications for the principles of just health care policy. This first chapter considers the moral foundations of rights to health care in accordance with five alternative social justice frameworks: Libertarianism, Utilitarianism, Marxism, Liberalism, and the Capabilities Approach. The next four chapters then provide a descriptive and critical analysis of the history of the U.S. health care system, the contemporary organization of health care with respect to health care financing and health care services, and long-term care of the aged and disabled. The next two chapters provide an analysis of health care disparities and the theoretical frameworks that inform our understanding of the social determinants of disparities in health and health care. The final chapter then provides a political and principled analysis of health care reform, with particular attention to the policy aims and structure of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and legislation that has been proposed and might plausibly be enacted to replace it. The book concludes with a health care financing framework that would be in keeping with both the demands of justice as pertains to a social right to health care and the unique social and political context of the U.S. health care system. It is an ideal text for graduate courses in health care policy and disparities, the U.S. health care system in schools of social work, public health, nursing, medicine, and public policy and administration.