Rather than social work practice being based solely on a therapist’s intuition and assumptions, social workers should consider a system of evaluation and measurement based on hard data, suggests a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Not only do current professional social work therapists not know their past performance stats, they also are not able to provide any performance measures regarding their active patient caseload,” said David Patterson Silver Wolf, associate professor at the Brown School and author of the piece “The New Social Work,” published Sept. 13 in the Journal of Evidence-Informed Social Work.