Engaging & Working with the Hard to Reach Client

NASW Vermont

Two-day workshop

In this workshop, participants will consider the dynamics and skills of engaging and working with hard-to-reach individuals, families, and groups. The client will be described as facing a "first decision" - whether or not to accept the need for help and to accept the worker. Discussion will include: dealing with denial in the beginning phase of work; confronting authority issues with mandatory clients (or semi-voluntary clients); creating conditions of trust and safety which allow clients to lower their defenses; challenging the "illusion of work"; understanding resistance and responding to it constructively; dealing with taboo subjects such as physical and substance abuse, sex, death and violence.

Attention will be paid to issues involved in working inter-culturally (working with differences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.) and intra-culturally (working with persons who are like us). Core skills to facilitate dealing with these practice issues will be identified. The skills include: "tuning in," contracting, elaborating, empathizing, sharing one's own feelings, providing data, and making a demand for work. A premium will be placed upon honesty in relating to clients, the genuineness of the worker's empathy, the worker's capacity to integrate the personal and professional self, and the importance of confrontation and demand.

This workshop will also explore the skills required to work with professionals from other agencies and systems. Problems such as the battle over "who owns the client?" will be explored. Examples in which professionals claim sole responsibility for clients or refuse responsibility to provide services will be examined as illustrations of how inter-professional conflict can have a negative impact on services to clients. The skills for creating more constructive working relationships between individual workers, departments or services will be presented using case examples as illustrations.

Register for Engaging & Working with the Hard to Reach Client at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/engaging-working-with-the-hard-to-reach-client-tickets-628528625037.

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Tags: virtual continuing education webinar chapter vermont

Engaging & Working with the Hard to Reach Client

NASW Vermont

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