This crazy year is almost over! How does it feel? 2017 has been one of the most professionally dynamic years of my life, a year I would both begin and end working as a full-time hospice social worker, with six months of full-time military journalism in the middle. I’m happy with the work I’ve done in both roles.
This website has also achieved what I hoped it would this year: a good start to becoming a dependable resource for hospice social workers. Here are some specific examples:
Hearty amounts of quality content
54 articles were posted to this site with the goal of giving hospice social workers tools for thriving in their roles. Topics focused on the basic skill sets, to include establishing relationships with patients, attending deaths, advocating for resources and understanding how MPOA and DNR processes work.
The year’s most popular articles were The highest priority of social work routine visits in hospice, Hospice social work visit notes made easy, and 5 tricks to getting hospice documentation done in less time. Check them out!
Future articles will deal with more advanced or complex topics, such as counseling for patients and family members, preventing burnout, and succeeding in establishing relationships with team members so you are most empowered to do fantastic work.
Gained some exposure
All the big websites seem to have thousands of likes and followers, but I’m quite gratified about the close to 200 subscribers on this site and almost 400 followers on the accompanying Facebook page. And the site’s pages have been viewed more than 10,000 times by almost 5,000 visitors. This ratio suggests I’m doing something right: Each visitor, on average, looks at two articles when visiting the site.
I know my writing isn’t always the most polished, and I would like more for feedback about how to improve both the content and delivery for my readers. But the fact that people are visiting, looking around, signing up and then coming back motivates me to keep going.
Gained some perspective
Most of what I wrote this year I felt I knew how to do quite well, but writing about how forced me to think about the tasks far more explicitly than doing them required me to do. Thinking consciously about what I had been doing implicitly forced me to think about the work in rational terms. Admittedly, rational thinking is seldom wiser than intuition, but it is a vehicle for examining what we do intuitively for ways in which rational thought may add to it. This year I performed such an examination on my intuitive feel for hospice social work.
See you after winter break!
I’m going to take two weeks off from this writing to allow myself to focus fully on getting a good start at a new position. In the meantime, check out any articles on this site you may have missed. You can start at the Table of Contents, or at the very first post if you’d like to read the blog like a book.
See you soon!