Formation of social work students for work with dying people and survivors
Formácia študentov sociálnej práce pre prácu so zomierajúcimi ľuďmi a pozostalými
Abstract:
Background: One of the target groups of social work is people in palliative and hospice care and survivors. However, no matter what social facility the social worker works in and with any target group, he may contact a client who has lost a loved one and is going through grief. Therefore, no matter how difficult death is, students of social work as a helping profession working with clients who have lost a loved one must manage this topic thoroughly.
Objectives: The paper aims to specify which subjects at the Faculty of Theology of the Catholic University focus on social work with the dying or survivors. Find out about social work students’ attitudes to death. Find out whether social work students tend to work with dying people or survivors.
Methodology: In the first part, we used the content analysis of study subjects from social work at the Faculty of Theology of the Catholic University in Ružomberok focused on social work with the dying or the survivors. In the second part, we researched with students of social work. In the research, we used a semi-structured interview and the “Cinquain” method.
Results: For students, the word death is often associated with terms such as fear, uncertainty, sadness, pain, trauma, suffering, loss of a loved one, abandonment, tragedy, end of a severe illness, end, transition to the next stage that everyone must undergo, stage of life, to which everyone gets once. In researching whether students are afraid of their death, we encountered answers such as perceptions of uncertainty about the course of death itself, fears of what they have not yet managed to do and what they would regret, whether feeling fear not of their death but also the death of their beloved person. Working with dying people would be depressing for many students and they would not be able to depersonalize; some said that it would depend on quite a bit on how the dying person would accept dying. More students tend to work with the survivors compared to working with the dying person. However, the students expressed their concerns about this service’s complexity due to the worker’s pain transfer and the unrealistic expectations that the social worker will somehow handle and manage the pain.
Conclusion: For some students, death is torturous, but in social work, it is a necessary topic. A separate space is devoted to it in the study subjects. Social work students are professionally prepared for social work with the dying and also with the survivors. However, the teacher should make this issue sensitive because each student may react differently to the topic of death. Open discussions are also appropriate where concerns about this issue can be addressed.
Key words: Death, Dying, Methods, Social work, Students, Survivor.
