Changing Attitude of the Army with Regard to Venereal Diseases

by current trends of thought with respect to the training of the social worker herself. The schools of social work are reconsidering their curricula with a view to developing a more adequate "core program" which would avoid premature specialization but give each student a wider vision of the basic principles in social work (including its health aspects) which are important for the generalized social case worker. There will be resistance in certain localities to a generalized social case work program, due to the traditional feeling that the worker in a public welfare department who provides direct relief in the form of money grants, food, clothing, shelter, and medical care must deal only with the indigent or the near-indigent. This is, however, a prejudice which is gradually losing its force. A sound public welfare program should include case work service to all families who need such service, whether they also require direct relief or not. Even, however, if we agree on the desirability of providing for the homes of every area a local field worker in public health nursing and a local field worker in public welfare, we should be only at the threshold of our jurisdictional possibilities. Nearly all health problems and most social problems involve emotional stresses; and the psychiatric socialworker comes into the picture. Working out from the hospital and clinic is the medical-social worker. In the health or social agency is the nutritionist. In many localities there may be still other specialists of diverse allied types-dealing with poliomyelitis or rheumatic fever, or deficiencies in sight or hearing. It is clearly uneconomical and ineffective to have five or six different experts in the fields of health and welfare visiting the home. In public health nursing the ideal of generalized district service has been almost universally accepted-though not as yet always realized. The field worker in such a program must have enough training in allied knowledges to know where her own competence ends; and she. must have at her disposal expert specialists for consultation in their various fields. There might be real gain in a program under which there were two, and only two, workers for home visiting, the district nurse and the district social worker, both with some training in the elements of mental hygiene-cooperating with each other and relying on the specialist to supplement their less intensive skills. The representative of medical-social service in a hospital or of a local mental hygiene clinic should naturally have access to the home but would go in after mutual agreement with, or referral by, the public health nurse or the family social worker under whose general jurisdiction a given family might be. Perhaps this is a Utopian dream-perhaps just a nightmare. Possibly it may be a problem which the American Public Welfare Association and the American Public Health Association might study to advantage through a joint committee.