Social Work Documentation

Book excerpt: Social work practitioners spend a lot of time documenting services they provide, but many are ill-prepared for this practice responsibility. In Social Work Documentation: A Guide to Strengthening Your Case Recording, Nancy Sidell has written the perfect, practical, how-to book on developing effective documentation. Regardless of the practice setting, clinical specialty, and documentation format, this book will help to build better recording skills. In her book, Social Work Documentation: A Guide to Strengthening Your Case Recording, Dr. Sidell provides a clear, concise, and thorough justification of why documentation is important, the different styles used to record client information, and an array of valuable case exercises to work through. Particularly useful is the inclusion of current and relevant examples of documentation that represent a range of practice fields at all levels of social work intervention to include: micro, mezzo, and macro. Woven throughout the workbook are ethical, legal, and supervisory situations that occur in practice that require the reader to critically think about how they would respond. This book is suitable and highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate education, agency trainings, and continuing education courses.