Case tools notes

Where you will be going What are your future plans for this client? What do you hope to achieve with this client? What does the client hope to achieve?

What needs to be done for this to be achieved? However, when I meet him for the first time, I realise that he is not what the case notes painted him out to be. When you are stating an opinion, you need to be clear that you are. For example, when stating an opinion or your own personal assessment, you might try:.

You might find case notes to be the most frustrating part of your job as a social worker. Broadly, there are two ways of doing case notes. The first is immediately after you have a session with a client. There are benefits to this. Firstly, you are better able to remember what has happened. However, doing this prevents you from clearing other more urgent work that arrives in your inbox.

As social workers, you are probably handling multiple crises a day. Having the luxury to sit down undisturbed after you meet your client to write your case notes is probably … yes, a luxury.

I use this method. Doing this is helpful because it helps me to be more efficient with my time. I find myself concentrating better when I have a block of uninterrupted time to write the case notes. Often, I find myself struggling to come up with proper assessments and further actions. Putting these clients on the back burner in my mind helps me to think through what I should do moving forward.

Having some distance from it also helps you to think more clearly. But there are negatives. Of course, you are likely to forget some key events in your session if you write it later. These are the two methods.

Try one of these methods, and see which suits you better. How do you know? You need to have a system. Especially when you need to do so many other things. You need to have a system of writing your case notes, filing your case notes, and making sure that they are easily found. Different organisations have different ways of filing too. Some may have an electronic database of clients and case notes attached to them. Others might still be using physical files. There are different systems that work for different people.

What matters is the principle. You need to make sure that your case notes are:. This is a simple backup to remind you of what you have done in the past. After every session with a client, I will jot it down in my planner to remind me of what I have done. You might be tired of writing sometimes. Try dictating it. Go to Microsoft Word. At the menu bar, you will see Dictate. Try it. Doing good casework involves writing good case notes.

What more can you you do to make them better? What you see is not the same as what you think you see. When you start your case notes, I like to split it into 3 parts — observations, assessment, and further actions. In your observations section, state clearly what you saw, heard, touched, smelt, or even tasted. Engage your 5 senses. This is important in social work as our five senses can often give us clues for our assessment.

For example, when I recently worked with someone who was hoarding, I noted that there was no distinct smell in her home. It indicated to me that whilst her home was filled with items, she was not hoarding in a way that made her home deeply unhygienic, pest-infested, or dangerous for her continued living.

We all view things through a subjective lens. You can never remove this lens. But it is possible to be more aware of it. When you write your observations, try to include greater description, rather than perception. How do you know he was angry, instead of disappointed at your mistrust? Adding your own perceptions like these can color how future social workers work with him. They might see him as a difficult client.

Future social workers might assume that he is difficult to work with, and end up being defensive in their conversations with him. Humans are story-telling creatures. Automatic tracking, management of version, and management of release can be done with the help of configuration management.

Change Control are a part of configuration management. The changes that occur in the software after fixing its baseline or after the first release of the software are dealt by change control tools. Tracking the changes, management of files, management of codes etc. The change policy of the organization can be enforced by using change control. The programming environments like integrated development environment , library consisting of in built modules, simulation are all included in programming tools.

The development of software product is aided by these and simulation and testing features are included. The simulated version of the software product to be built is called a prototype in software. The look and feel of the product is provided by the prototype and several aspects of the actual product can be simulated using prototyping.

Graphical libraries are contained in the prototyping tools. User interfaces and design that are hardware independent can be created using prototyping. Rapid prototypes can be built using prototyping based on the existing information. The software prototype can be simulated using prototyping tools. The web pages like forms, text, script, graphic etc.

The web page that is being developed can be previewed to see how it looks after completion using web development. Monitoring the engineering process and methods used for software development to ensure the quality is as per the standards of the organization can be performed using quality assurance tools.

The configuration change control and software testing tools come under the category of QA tools. If there are any modifications after the delivery of the software product can be done through software maintenance tools. Like Article. Recommended Articles. Article Contributed By :. Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. Writing code in comment? Please use ide. Load Comments. What's New. Most popular in Software Engineering. More related articles in Software Engineering.