FASTLearn Episode 14 – The Role of Clinical Social Work 221 and Psychological First Aid

What is Psychological First Aid? 

Well, psychological first aid actually is a set of skills and knowledge that can be used to help people who are in distress, especially during disasters, during critical event or difficult situation. This is one way of helping people feel calm and to make them cope in a difficult situation during emergencies, especially now we have a lot of disasters, typhoon, landslide. We have also earthquake and all those people who are victims of this disaster, they do suffer. Sometimes they are just silent, but we have to make sure that they given psychological first aid because time is of the essence. At least within 72 hours you have to give that, otherwise, if you don’t give it, there will be PTSD, this is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so we want to prevent that one. 

What is the relevance of Clinical Social Work 221 of UPOU in the promotion of mental health?

Well I’m glad you asked that question because UPOU is offering Social Work 221, which is Social Work practice that deals with individual and family diagnosis and treatment. It’s a very relevant subject right now which I’m teaching. I’ve been teaching this for 7 years and we are trying to prepare practitioners, social work practitioners, to be clinical social workers, so that they will be able to help in preventing the breakdown of family and also to address problems like sexual abuses. Traumatic experiences are also addressed. We want to make sure that we provide them the services that they need. So we have to make sure that this practitioner are now being given training on how to do individual, we may call it psychotherapy, so they are taught on how to do assessment. Assessment is very important because assessment is the basis for making a good planning approaches.  What helping approaches that you want to provide in this particular case. They will be taught on how to prepare case study reports, which also will be the basis of intervention. Otherwise, if we don’t train people, they will just be providing palliative services, but this one is similar to providing psychotherapy so that the person will be able to handle difficult situation.