In the context of an ever-changing health care environment, the ability to define social work roles and to be able to advocate for social work programs in the field of health is critical. This assignment is an opportunity to design and present a proposal for a new service or program in a setting of your choosing (i.e., hospital, outpatient, prevention agency, specialty clinic, advocacy). Working in a group of students, you are expected to identify a specific need and population and prepare a 30-minute presentation on this topic. This presentation will have several key components:

Statement of the problem and why services are needed: 

• What is the scope of the problem areas
• What is known and how is it relevant to social work practice

Findings from literature review: 

• How has the problem been studied or evaluated
• What literature exists about practice approaches and methods

Description of the program or service: 

• Introduce your intervention strategy

Presentation of practice issues and plan for implementing the intervention: 

• How will you begin
• How will individuals find out about/gain access to your program/service
• How do you anticipate that other health professionals will respond and/or interact with this intervention

Description of resources that would be needed to implement the intervention.

Definition of ways to evaluate the success of your program/service: 

• Review of literature to identify ways to evaluate this program/service
• Identify evaluation instruments that you would use

Identify how this relates to other setting and community resources: 

• Identify how this relates to other setting and community resources
• Identify relevant government/other agencies to this client population
• Discuss opportunities for partnerships or possible overlap with other programs that will need to be considered.

You are encouraged to interview professionals in the field to get ideas and strategies. This presentation should be targeted to an inter-professional decision-making audience as if you were presenting this to a committee in the setting that you have chosen.

The group is expected to provide the instructor with the following prior to the presentation: 

• an outline of the presentation (this may be a print out of PowerPoint slides)
• a copy of all handouts
• a reference list of key literature used in your research of the presentation and any additional resources you found helpful.

All group members are expected to share delivering the presentation to the class. Ten minutes will be allotted following the presentation for questions and discussion. Peer feedback/evaluation will be included although the final grade for this assignment will be given by the instructor.

Note: This assignment was submitted for inclusion in this module by:

Susan Blacker, BSW, MSW, RSW
Adjunct Professor, University of Toronto School of Social Work
Director, Oncology Integration
St. Michael’s Hospital
Toronto, Ontario