DECISIONS REGARDING THE ORDER OF OPENING MULTIPLE HIGH-RISK CASES - APILOT-STUDY IN AN URBAN HOSPITAL

Decision making is central to social work practice. Decision making ha s been extensively researched outside of the field of social work. Wit hin the field some work has been done regarding decision making, but m uch remains to be done. A pilot study was undertaken to describe how h ospital social workers decide to open a specific case when they have t o choose among multiple high-risk cases and the guidelines for case op enings do not dictate a specific choice. The results indicate that soc ial workers in this setting do not view the various established high-r isk factors as equally important. Rather, decisions were based on an i ntegration of explicit and implicit high risk factors developed by wor kers over time.