Clinical Social Worker Job Description, Key Duties, tasks, and Responsibilities

This post provides complete information on the clinical social worker job description, to help you learn the duties, tasks, and responsibilities they commonly perform.

What Does a Clinical Social Worker Do?

A clinical social worker is a healthcare provider who works with people by preventing, diagnosing and treating behavioral and emotional abnormalities in them.

The job description of the clinical social worker revolves around the social aspect of patients’ health and provides them with useful advice and guidance on how to deal with a range of physiological issues that they may experience.

Trained in the area of providing healthcare, the clinical social worker’s duties include diagnosing and treating mental disorders in patients and taking care of them throughout the process of their treatment.

As a healthcare provider, he/she empathizes with patients by putting his/herself in their shoes, understanding their challenges and conditions, so as to help them pass through them successfully.

He/she pays close attention to patients, observing their response to treatment and where they aren’t responding positively, recommends a change of treatment.

He/she is responsible for working with individuals, couples and families to overcome emotional and behavioral challenges they may be experiencing and develops therapies to provide a remedy to these challenges.

Other tasks they perform include helping people who have experienced traumatizing events to overcome any psychological and emotional burdens they may experience as a result of their previous encounters.

Clinical Social Workers advise clients and members of their family on the best practices they need to help them recover faster.

They work closely with individuals who suffer from substance abuse and work tirelessly to get them clean and stay away from those substances.

Clinical Social Worker Job Description Sample/Example/Template

The major duties, tasks and responsibilities which social workers who work at the clinics are expected to perform as part of their job description includes the following:

• Develop and nurture mutual relationship and confidence with patients.
• Evaluate patients’ conditions to determine the level of care and assistance they need.
• Retrieve patients’ personal and social health history in order to determine their conditions.
• Work together with patients to come up with effective and realizable treatment techniques that will yield good results.
• Enhance clients’ cognitive and behavioral changes that are in line with the overall treatment.
• Evaluate the efficiency of all treatments administered to patients and identify the most effective ones.
• Understand the individuality of patients and come up with specific treatments that meet their individual conditions.
• Attend courses and trainings organized for clinical social workers in order to learn new skills and techniques for better treatment of patients.
• Keep clean records and documentation of clients’ information, conditions, treatments and progress.
• Direct clients to available community resources which are beneficial to them.
• Ensure that clients are aware of assistance from the government and help them get it.
• Check on patients even after treatment, to avoid a relapse of their condition.
• Work with the family of patients to provide all the care and support they need to heal faster.

Clinical Social Worker Requirements: Skills, Abilities, and Knowledge for Career Success

Shown below are important qualities most employers will expect applicants vying for the position of clinical social worker to have:

• Have good human relations.
• Have good communication skills.
• Ability to evaluate conditions.
• Ability to empathize with people.
• Ability to intervene in crises
• Being patient.