A Research About The Local Fusion Of Hospital Volunteer Service Mechanism And Medical Social Work

Health has always been one of the subjects of much attention, the medicine and health care reform in China and medical disputes make people from all fields actively explore the way to improve hospital services. Under this background,the volunteer service in hospital and medical social work become one kind of attempts to ensure the better medical care. Our country is relatively late on to develop social work, so many problem still exist. In the western developed countries, the development path of social work is from bottom to top, from private practice to formal system process. However, social work was introduced into our country in the 1980s, forming the development path of top to down, accompanying the phenomenon of the professional education ahead of social practice. Therefore, the development of social work in our country will appear all sorts of special problems, and these problems also reflect in the field of medical social work. Hospital is a major area to develop medical social work. In our country, hospitals in many cities are carrying out volunteer service in response to the government instructions, at the same time, these hospitals are also introducing the medical social work. The medical social work that came from the western country will meet many difficulties which differ from western world in the localization process.In this paper, the author studies the local fusion of the hospital volunteer service mechanism and the medical social work through the method of field research, and obtaining the information through interviews and field observation. There are two clues in this paper which aim to analysis the question. One clue is "the subject", it means the volunteer service mechanism and the medical social work are seen as two subjects to analyze the condition of M hospital. The other clue is "’the process of development". The author divides the local fusion process in M hospital into three processes which are called "separation", "intersection" and "fusion". In this research, the interview objects including administrative staffs who manage hospital volunteer service, volunteers, medical personnel, some patients in the ward and the intern student that majoring social work. The purpose of this study is to describe the development state of medical social work in the process of localization, to explain the temporary phenomenon of hospital volunteer service mixing with social work, to explore the way to develop medical social work in our country.This study found that the volunteer service mechanism and social work plans in M hospital have experienced a process from leisure activities to the formal rules. There are different understanding and cognition of medical social work between the hospital internal staffs in M hospital. The medical social work in M is in the initial period,it means the phenomenon of ideas more than practice. M hospital plans to promote the medical social work by the way of "pilot". The author thinks that needs and system jointly contributed to the development of volunteer service and medical social work. In the need level, the status of localization in M hospital reflects the needs of many groups, and it is a kind of accumulation including felt need, expressed need, comparative need, normative need. In the system level, the administrative leading path is the expression of the western social work embedded into the Chinese society. For this situation, the author explores some approaches about the local fusion at the macro, medium and micro levels. The author hopes this paper will provide some research experience and enlightening viewpoints to the M hospital and else hospital that are similar with M hospital.