Empower patients with culture-specific strategies for promoting health, treating disease, and preventing violence!Current reports show that Black Americans have the highest death rate of all racial and ethnic groups. They suffer disproportionately from a number of fatal diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, and certain cancers. Moreover, violence takes far too high a toll, especially among young Black men. Clearly a different approach to health education and promotion is needed to end this tragic waste of valuable human lives. Health Care in the Black Community: Empowerment, Knowledge, Skills, and Collectivism proposes an innovative model for health professionals working in the Black community.Traditional Western medicine focuses on sickness, the isolated individual, and the material world. However, the Afrocentric values of many Black people emphasize wellness, the community, and the spiritual world. By basing health care approaches on the community's positive values of holistic healing and mutual assistance, Health Care in the Black Community suggests practical, effective strategies for promoting physical and emotional wellness. This comprehensive and informative book offers a solid intellectual framework as well as practical advice. Health Care in the Black Community: identifies deeply held African-American cultural traditions and attitudes offers specific suggestions for combining health care priorities with respect for cultural concerns shows how to gain compliance by involving patients in their own care and drawing on community strengths discusses the impact of specific problems such as low self-esteem, infertility, HIV/AIDS, and violence on Black families develops strategies for preventing family violence by helping family members define and identify emotions shares programs and ideas for enhancing the physical and mental health of elderly Black people identifies ways to overcome the drawbacks of early parenthood Health Care in the Black Community offers health care professionals-- policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and educators in the fields of social work, health care, and cultural studies--successful methods, models, and suggestions to help improve health care in Black communities.
The purpose of this book is to explain the process in which individuals tell and retell their narratives, especially during developmental and other transitions in order to create meaning and continuity in their lives. The other goal is to clarify the nature and types of narratives that emerge in people’s natural environments during such transitions and during counseling sessions with social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, nurses, and other service providers. Further, it also describes practical narratives and approaches and includes relevant case examples to illustrate how those approaches have been applied effectively in social work and other helping professions. The text is organized in two sections. Part One is focused on the theoretical foundations of narrative practice and on five basic principles. The five chapters of Part Two demonstrate the application of advanced narrative skills in practice with clients who are challenged by various life span transitions. Clients’ narratives are included in each chapter to illustrate particular advanced narrative skills and major discussion points. The cultural context of such narratives may involve a combination of such factors as clients’ race and ethnicity, language, religion and spirituality, gender, age, sexual orientation, disabling conditions, social class, and location. Tables and figures included in each chapter illustrate specifically how particular narrative strategies can be used with clients and also clarify how to use those approaches in combination with other practice frameworks, including family systems, task-centered, crisis, solution-focused, group mutual aid, cognitive behavioral, and brief theoretical approaches. In addition, to the individual, family, community, organizational, and cultural narratives, the book also includes other story forms such as poetry, metaphors, proverbs, parables, letters, personal journals, art, and music.
This book is the first to utilize the empowerment approach of social work practice with substance-abusing clients, bridging clinical, community, and social policy approaches in order to place individual addiction in its sociopolitical context. As Lorraine Gutiérrez points out in her foreword, the book "challenges us to transform our thinking about substance abuse and move beyond our existing focus on individual deficits." Arguing that pathology-focused definitions of substance abuse tend to transform people into their problems, Freeman instead advocates for strengths-centered policies and regulations as the means to empower clients, communities, and society as a whole. Freeman outlines basic empowerment principles and practices, then details the service delivery processes; offers a context for power, policy, and funding decisions; and examines the needs of special populations. Case examples supplement each chapter, and the final part examines four exemplary programs that demonstrate the empowerment process in action.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.