Aging Related Resources

NASW is among the stakeholder organizations that developed the National Blueprint: Achieving Quality Malnutrition Care for Older Adults, released in March 2017. This publication presents an overview of malnutrition among older adults and outlines strategies and tactics that various stakeholders, including social workers, can implement to prevent and care for older adult malnutrition in acute, post-acute, and community settings.

The Reframing Elder Abuse Project is a partnership of the FrameWorks Institute and the federally funded National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA). As a member of the Reframing Elder Abuse Committee, NASW provides advisory support to the project. Introductory materials: FrameWorks blog (8/1/2017); transcript of FrameWorks–NCEA Twitter chat (8/17/2017), in which NASW participated; archived version of FrameWorks–NCEA Webinar (9/7/2017). Detailed information: Talking Elder Abuse toolkit and Strengthening the Support research report, both released by FrameWorks in May 2017. 

Older adults living with advanced illness or nearing the end of life need and deserve person and family centered care that is well coordinated and honors their dignity, values, and health care choices at each stage of their illness.  Older adults must have access to the full range of high quality medical care and treatment, including curative care, palliative care, and hospice care. 

In many situations, social workers are the primary professionals assisting clients with advance directives.  Social workers in a variety of treatment settings may interact with clients or patients who have an advance directive or other documents related to health care proxy decision making or clients who would benefit from executing such a document or documents.  Social work assistance with advance care planning is common in aging, hospice, and palliative care settings and it is expanding to include mental health care settings.

In early 2011 NASW sponsored two professional research trips to Cuba to learn about social services in health care, child welfare, and aging. This report describes the activities of both social work delegations and information learned from the experience.

The goal of hospice and palliative care is to improve the physical, psychosocial, and spiritual quality of life for people living with a serious illness and their families. The terms hospice and palliative care describe two distinct but closely related models of care, both interdisciplinary in nature and available across a wide range of settings.