As a volunteer or paid helpline worker, we all endeavour to improve our work on the lines. Whether you have 100 or 1000 hours on your helpline there will always be things you can learn and strategies that you can apply to better connect with callers. Listed below are a few strategies you can implement…
Declining Empathy in Social Work Students
I read an interesting article recently, from the Journal of Social Work Education, the title was “An Evaluation of Prepracticum Helping Skills Training for Graduate Social Work Students.” The abstract is reproduced below: “Although foundational practice classes play a key role in helping prepracticum students develop counseling skills, we know little about the effectiveness of…
Marge Simpson and Church Counselling
In the long running show, “The Simpsons”, the main characters Homer and Marge take on a variety of jobs across the series. These virtually always finish with the main characters back in their careers at the end of the episode, Marge as a housewife and Homer as a Nuclear Safety Technician, but they provide an…
Key Assumptions Check for Intelligence Research
The Key Assumptions Check is a simple way to begin an intelligence analysis or research project. Despite its simplicity, it is also extremely powerful, because it allows us to question the underlying assumptions that we make influencing our decisions and thought processes. Because of confirmation bias, we often exclude information from our worldview or from…
The Nurses’ Global Assessment of Suicide Risk (NGASR)
New! This article has been updated August 9, 2016 to include more information about the scoring and links to useful tools to accompany. The Nurses’ Global Assessment of Suicide Risk (NGASR) is a tool that nurses can utilize to assess for suicide risk in a clinical, inpatient environment. The tool was originally developed to assist…