Rethinking Decision Making
Social workers play an essential role in society. They aim at helping individuals with various problems in the community. In that case, such a profession is enveloped with challenging situations that require critical thinking and making thought-provoking decisions. This article discusses the modes of agency, the use of formal training during crisis interventions, perspective decision making models, and the development of contextually sensitive models of agency in the workplace for the social workers. Many researchers have been concerned with the possible ways social workers use knowledge in making decisions in their line of work. Various normative models of clinical decision making are used by workers to enhance conscious decision making. Models such as systematic, planned practice, and formulated evidence-based practices help workers to integrate knowledge into their processes of decision-making.
The research discovers that there are high possibilities that mental health workers do not initiate decision making practices during various crisis intervention. The mental health workers modify the normative model of worker agency as stipulated by the Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI), a program for systematic crisis prevention and management, mainly for workers in the youth care. The paper describes how the University Home and School (UHS) mental health workers are doing what it takes to meet the high-stakes and time-pinned interactions with clients during a crisis by modifying the normative model work agency.
The research finds out that the mental health workers base most of their decisions on “instinct” (a necessary emotional clinical mechanism) during behavioral crisis intervention. Various factors actively influence instincts or rather the ability of a mental worker to make preferred clinical decisions and actions. For instance, the culture of the facility (UHS in this case), TCH techniques, organizational constraints and opportunities and most importantly the demands during the real-time crisis handling.
Mental health workers are the most decisive elements in residential centers. They are the sole determinant of the direction the crisis should take, escalation or de-escalation. Therefore, it is assertive that the competency during crisis intervention fundamentally depends on the health care TCI skills and experience. A well-trained mental health worker is able to predict structures that are probable to be reproduced by different actors. This ability puts them in a better position of making decisions that are closely inclined with the TCI curriculum, thus managing the crisis with a “mastery of operations.” Therefore, a mechanism such as Habitus offers essential ways that are helpful for workers in taking assertive actions in the event of a crisis occurrence. It provides a comprehensive knowledge of understanding, predicting, and, more importantly, making desirable and conscious actions that are in line with certain norms during a given crisis. It helps the workers to explain their assertions during their agency.