Our highly trained social work team provides support services and discharge planning throughout the hospital system. We work with patients and their families in the hospital’s medical, surgical, psychiatric, pediatric and neonatal units, as well as OB-GYN clinics, trauma and emergency departments, and hemodialysis units and clinics, among others.

The social work team is engaged in the following:

• Emotional support of patients and their families struggling with the effects of hospitalization, illness and trauma. Services include assessing and strengthening coping patterns, as well as working through patients’ expectations and concerns related to changes in lifestyle and individual functioning.

• Ensuring safe discharge of vulnerable patients, either into the community at large or into a more structured setting, such as shelters, residential care, and nursing homes.  Social workers make thorough and detailed referrals for patients to crucial community healthcare services.

• Community resource advocacy. Social workers cultivate and maintain knowledge of, and relationships with, community agencies providing services to our patients upon discharge.  These include all of the outpatient clinics and services within the St. Barnabas system, city services such as Administration for Children’s Services, Human Resources Administration, Homeless Services, and private “Community Based Organizations.”