Social Work Practice Foundations
For people entering social work: structure intake, assessment and documentation within scope, then leave colleagues a handoff that protects continuity of care.
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Social Work Practice Foundations
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About this course
This course is for social work trainees and new practitioners starting practice. You will connect intake, assessment, planning and documentation, apply ethical and scope boundaries to a case, and produce a handoff note that preserves the client context, decisions, next actions and questions for colleagues. This module introduces the foundational scope of practice and professional standards that guide social work. You will learn to apply a verifiable workflow, document your decisions clearly, and prepare a clean handoff so that continuity of care is preserved. By the end, you will have a practical framework to structure your first professional interactions with clients and colleagues. This module gives you a repeatable, verifiable workflow for handling a social work caseload from intake to handoff. You will learn how to triage cases by urgency, document decisions defensibly, and leave a clean transition so any colleague can continue the case without losing context. By the end, you will have a personal workflow template you can apply on day one of any social services role. This module gives you a verifiable workflow to run a social work case from intake to handoff. You will learn how to structure your notes, communicate decisions with clarity, and leave records that another professional can pick up without confusion. Practical templates and short exercises will help you internalize the routine. This module teaches you how to run a verifiable social work workflow with built-in quality checks, structured risk assessment, and clean escalation to supervisors or other services. You will practice documenting decisions defensibly and leaving a clear handoff so any colleague can continue the case safely. By the end, you will have a reusable template for closing or transferring cases with confidence. This final module puts everything together through a realistic case scenario. You will walk a client situation through intake, assessment, planning, documentation, and a clean handoff to another professional. By the end, you will have produced written artifacts that mirror what social workers use in real practice.
What you'll learn
- Identify the core scope of practice and ethical boundaries of a social worker
- Apply a step-by-step workflow to intake, assess, plan, and document a case
- Produce clear documentation and a structured handoff note for colleagues
- Recognize when to escalate a situation beyond your scope of practice
- Apply a five-stage social work workflow to any incoming case
- Prioritize a mixed caseload using a risk-and-urgency matrix
- Document decisions in a defensible, auditable format
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