I’ve selected Mrs. A. for my intervention project, but I can no longer use her because she has been having some family problems and have missed coming to see me for 2 weeks. Since this is not reliable for me I have decided to switch to another client with whom I feel I established a very good relationship with.
JB is a 28 year old female who lives with her mother and younger sister in Brooklyn, NY. JB is from a Puerto Rican descent and is bi-lingual in Spanish and English. JB attended a special school until she graduated at age 21. Since that time JB has had no daily structure and would stay at home most of her time. JB is diagnosed with Obesity, Asthma and Moderate MR.
When I first met with JB I had asked her very basic questions to get a sense of who she is and in that time I have noticed that JB has a very poor eye contact and kept looking down the entire time as we were talking. JB presently to be very “medicated” and by that I mean she took her time to speak and spoke slowly – to which I later found out that she takes medication that makes her less anxious and more calm. JB also presented to have a difficulty distinguishing between days from months and months from years. Aside from these conditions when I asked JB about her goals she had mentioned that she wants to change her life by starting to lose weight. In addition she wants to find a day program so she can do something during the day instead of staying at home. I told her that all of these goals are realistic and I would help her achieve these goals with the period of time that I will have with her. Her only complaint was that she wants all these goals, but she can’t manage coming in to her appointments. I told her that she should look at these appointments in this way: as a way of getting out of the house and one step closer to achieving her goals.
My intervention with JB is to plan her schedule out ahead of time and write down all of her appointments on the calendar – this way she will be motivated and will have a way of keeping up with them.
I am sorry that you had to switch clients in the middle of the semester, but it's not an unusual situation.
ReplyDeleteIn order to catch up, you have several things that you need to do:
1) Figure out how you are going to measure JB's progress.
2) Collect baseline data - you may need to do this retrospectively because you need to also
3) Begin collecting intervention data.
Please be more specific in goal-setting for JB. Is the goal for her to be able to plan her schedule by herself eventually? With help? If so, who will help her on an ongoing basis once you terminate with her?
Despite these challenges, which are inherent in social work practice, I'm sure that you will be able to get the ball rolling quickly with this client.