Social Worker Interview Essay

On February 26, 2016, I interview Becky Mai. This interview was conducted electronically through email, as we decided that worked best for both of us. Becky Mai is a CSW (Certified Social Worker in Nebraska). Specifically, she is a Medical Social Worker. She has worked in the hospital as a social worker/discharge planner and worked in Hospice for 16 years. But it doesn't stop there, she also provides Bereavement services and does Grief Support groups for Hospice. She has so many roles within the work setting that there are almost too many to count. One role Becky said she has is discharge planning. This includes working on a lot of different issues. She works with patients and families to make safe discharge plans by setting up nursing home and assisted living placements. She sets up Home, Health, and Hospice and arranges durable medical equipment. Making referrals to community agencies for a variety of services that will help make a safe plan for home, are also part of her duties. She assists people without insurance or that have financial concerns paying for medications, utilities etc. She makes
child and adult protective service referrals, along with helping people apply for Medicaid. Becky said that she has to be aware of a lot of Medicare, insurance, and government regulations in order to educate people on them. Working with patients with addictions, suicide attempts, domestic violence and setting up appropriate placement or counseling for those patients is also one of her roles. She assists in the ER with trauma situations and gets called in to provide family support in trauma situations. On the Hospice side, she said, “I do home visits and go to team meetings to assist patients and families that have a terminal diagnosis of six months or less to live. I assist with family support, make community referrals/arrange caregivers, assist with financial concerns, and set up power of attorneys. I also make Bereavement support calls to the families for up to 13 months after the patient has died, send grief support materials, and lead grief support groups.” She leads different team meetings to help improve the discharge process at the hospital by trying to help increase patients education and safety, therefore preventing them from being readmitted within 30 days. Lastly, she said, “I work a lot as a team with the Dr.’s, nurses and therapist on a wide variety of issues.” After learning all of the job roles and duties that she has, I asked her why she chose this field as a career interest.
She said that she choose social work as a career because she was interested in helping people and service fields. She said, “I really enjoy working with the elderly and this setting, in a rural area, allows me to do that. The last thing I asked her was what advice or words of wisdom she might have for students interested in the field of social work. She said that social work is a stressful field and health care specifically has a lot of regulations. But it is also rewarding and you get to meet a lot of wonderful patients and families in the process. Becky said that she would encourage students who want to pursue this field to do a lot of volunteer work in areas that you are interested in to see if you think it would be a good fit for you as a
career. I really enjoyed interviewing Becky Mai. She is an incredibly kind and selfless person who I learned does so much for her community and her patients. After asking her what her roles were in her work setting, I was amazed that one person can have so many tasks or responsibilities to do in a single days work. My favorite thing about this interview was asking Becky why she those her career. I loved her answer when she said that she chose this career because she was interested in helping people. I think that there needs to be more people like her in this world. There needs to be more people who are as caring, helpful, and just simply passionate about their job as Becky Mai is. She said it best when she said “ Social work is rewarding and you get to meet a lot of wonderful patients and families in the process.”