What is a caseworker and why are the benefits?
Caseworkers go by a lot of different names like support worker or service worker or something else. Also since nothing in this world is standardized the term case worker may mean different things in different organizations. For our purposes we will define a caseworker as someone from the government or an agency that helps people navigate the government support system. These supports can be financial aid or services (employment training, legal aid, medical support, etc.).
So you may be asking why I need a caseworker, can’t I just look this stuff up on the internet. The two main reasons to use a support person are time and access. As we all know caregivers and people with a disability are already low on time, money and energy. I mean you already need help with regular everyday stuff. The last thing you need is additional chores. As for access, unfortunately almost all government departments/services geared towards helping those with disabilities are woefully underfunded. Meaning the marketing budget is basically non-existent. So even on the off chance there is a perfect service available to you in your area at a price you can afford, there might be no way for you to ever find it.
Cue the caseworker, their entire job is to be in the know about the current upcoming services that can potentially help you. Even if your personal case worker does not know the answer to a question you have, they work in a department full of other case workers. Odds are that at least someone there has an answer or knows where to look to find out.
How to work effectively with your caseworker?
Case workers are not miracle workers. They will not solve all your problems for you. The more work you put into this relationship the more you will get out of it. So how do we do this? I like to break it down into stages (pre-meeting, meeting and post-meeting).
Pre-Meeting:
This is everything you need to do before every meeting with your caseworker. These steps are even more crucial for the 1st meeting. I know what you are thinking: “I can just figure it out during the meeting” or “ I will let the case worker lead this meeting” or “I don’t know what is going on here so I will just attend and see what happens”. Listen carefully when I say this: if there is a group of people meeting, only the person with a plan will have a chance to get what they want. If no one has a plan only chaos will happen. Trust me I have tried to have meetings where I did not prep work and all that happened was I wasted an hour for me, my brother, my parents, and our caseworker.
Step 1 is simply setting regularly recurring meetings. Rome was not built in a day and the mess you are in will not get sorted in one meeting. If it could be then you would not need a caseworker. If this is your first time meeting a caseworker you might be tempted to set a meeting everyday. If one is good, seven must be better. In which case no you are wrong. The frequency should match with what you are doing. A lot of times the first few meetings with a case worker will be intake forms and basic data entry. It is okay to schedule meetings fairly close together. I would recommend 1-3 days apart. Long enough to allow you and your family to reflect on the intake forms, think of changes you might want to make but not so long as you forget about what happened last time. Once you finish the intake stage and get into rhythm with your case worker I would suggest spreading out meetings to once a week or once every 2 weeks. I find this amount of time to be ideal. Short enough to become part of your routine but long enough to get work done in between meetings so that there is something usable to report back for both you and your case worker.
Next develop your list of goals for the meeting and prioritize them from most important to least. Now it might be tempting to put a hundred goals down but there is only so much that can be covered in a 1hr meeting. Better to have 2-3 goals that you can give your full attention to instead of 100 where you don’t even cover half of them. We will cover development of goals in a future post.
Once you have your prioritized list of goals, time to set an agenda. An agenda is simply a document that outlines what you are planning to cover for the meeting. I will put up an example of a template agenda that I created. Feel free to use it and/or modify it to suit your purposes. The reason I highly recommend having an agenda is #1 Creates something for everyone to follow along which in turn keeps everyone on topic. #2 It allows you to set the most important goals at the beginning of the meeting. #3 You can set time for everyone to speak, so even the most shy of people can have a chance to give their input.
Lastly, determine who needs to attend these meetings. The usual attendees should be the primary caregiver, the caseworker and the person living with a disability. Now contrary to what you may think. Having more people attend meetings is usually not better. It causes more chaos and eats up more time during meetings. What you should strive for is having only the people who are absolutely necessary attend meetings. Here less is definitely more!
In our next set of posts I will be going over development of goals, creating an agenda that works for you and managing your caseworker meetings.