Delivering Home-Based Services: A Social Work Perspective

Service providers are increasingly called upon to serve clients at home, a setting even a seasoned professional can find difficult to negotiate. From monitoring the health of older populations to managing paroled offenders, preventing child abuse, and reunifying families, home-based services require models that ensure positive outcomes and address the ethical dilemmas that might arise in such sensitive contexts. The contributors to this volume are national experts in diverse fields of social work practice, policy, and research. Treating the home as an ecological setting that guides human development and family interaction, they present rationales for and overviews of evidence-based models across an array of populations and fields of practice. Part 1 provides historical background and contemporary applications for home-based services, highlighting ethical, administrative, and supervision issues and summarizing the social policies that shape service delivery. Part 2 addresses home-based practice in such fields as child and adult mental health, school social work, and hospice care, detailing the particular population being treated, the policy and agency context, theories and empirical data, and practice guidelines. Part 3, the editors present a unifying framework and suggest future directions for home-based social work.