Social Work Commons^™

The Social Work Contract And Survivorship Services, Roger A. Lohmann, Carl Gaddis

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The concept of contracting by social workers is a useful way to describe the normative bounds of client-worker interaction. A growing literature on death and dying in recent years suggests first that long-term care institutions are increasingly the locales for dying in our society and that social workers and other professionals working in such locales have frequently dealt inadequately or not at all with the social and emotional dimensions of death and dying in institutional settings. This article proposes that the social work contract with terminally ill patients be extended to include their survivors.