Facilitating Clinical Decision Making and Evaluation

Abstract

Although systematic evaluation is now generally accepted as a necessary accompaniment to responsible and accountable practice and is a standard feature of most social work curricula, research indicates that social workers make minimal use of evaluation as part of their ongoing practice. The author relates this state of affairs to a failure to conceive of practice in a manner that accounts for the actual complexities of the treatment process, explicating decisionmaking processes and allowing for systematic evaluation. The author outlines a conceptual framework and decision-support tools that are applicable with any theoretical orientation to practice and that have been shown to aid practitioners in clinical decision making and evaluation.