Continued social changes and contextual diversity are giving rise to new health needs. Key social components are becoming increasingly significant, adding to the psychosocial complexity that goes hand in hand with medical complexity. Paediatric palliative care is not immune to modern-day realities and it is influenced by social and political factors. Accordingly, it has become important to highlight the existence of social complexity factors when it comes to the assessment, social intervention and support of patients and families.
A recently established field in Catalonia, palliative care offers a substantial professional domain for social work. The care model required for its development, based on a comprehensive approach to all the issues arising from the situation of terminal illness and the need to care for the patient and their family as a unit, makes the work of the social worker paramount. This has been true since the earliest experiences in English hospices, and indeed it also applies here in Catalonia.
Within child protection work involving families with children at risk, the safety of said children has been traditionally prioritised over the stability of family ties, often leading to coercive and adversarial situations involving families which frequently lead to the child being taken away. The unsuccessful outcomes of these typical practices have given rise to a call for cooperation between professionals and families which must unfold in the form of specific interventions in order to go beyond simple rhetoric.
The pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has highlighted the importance of social determinants in disease processes. Health services have created mechanisms aimed at protecting the most socially vulnerable citizens.
Formed by a Technical Board and led by social and healthcare workers from various health providers in the city of Barcelona, the Social Emergency Committee (attached to the Health Association of Barcelona) addressed needs relating to difficulties encountered with availability of safe accommodation where certain groups of citizens could spend their isolation suitably.
This paper strives to place in context the circumstances of the elderly and elderly people with Alzheimer's, while also setting out the general characteristics they bear and detailing various research projects that seek to improve the wellbeing of these elderly persons. A review is conducted which reveals how technology can favour mood in old age, introducing different lines of research and innovative social projects, emphasising social intervention through artificial intelligence.
Although pondering on death among children and young people is a disagreeable responsibility, the goal of paediatric palliative care is to strive to provide end-of-life support for children. Paediatric palliative care is established as the specialist field that deals with illnesses for which no cure is available. From a multidisciplinary position, the comprehensive paediatric palliative care network of Catalonia (XAPPI) is being implemented to provide a biopsychosocial and spiritual response for patients and families facing illnesses for which no possible treatment is available.
This paper seeks to analyse and describe the formative research process carried out on the context of the academic subject “Ethnographic Design”. It involved important challenges and opportunities since it was unfeasible to conduct face-to-face fieldwork on account of the COVID-19 pandemic; therefore, the work was performed online.
This article proposes reflections based on the systematic organisation of the experiences of social workers in secondary education in the province of Santa Cruz amid the context of the pandemic.
This paper details the launch within the space of little over three weeks of a tool for providing shelter and quarantine for hundreds of homeless people in the city of Barcelona. The mission of the new tool was to assure the right of all people who were sleeping rough in the city at the time to comply with the strict lockdown enforced by the health and civil protection authorities.
Support and individual guidance are basic tools when it comes to bringing about changes and enhancing personal and family progress in coping with care for relatives with dementia. This is because these components make it possible to bring about an impact on day-to-day aspects, to provide guidance in natural contexts and to offer support for carers in the process, helping to gain an acquaintance of said care process while generating the changes of perspective needed to live with the disease.
