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Case Management and Peer Services
Examples of client populations that might be aided by case management services include pregnant women, people who are homeless, clients with HIV/AIDS and other serious medical conditions, people with severe mental disorders, long-term welfare enrollees, people with physical disabilities, and people involved in the criminal justice system.
IOP programs—particularly those serving publicly funded clients—need to have detailed, up-to-date resource directories or formal arrangements with the following types of local services:
- Social service and child welfare agencies
- Vocational rehabilitation
- Training and employment assistance programs
- Preventive health care; inpatient, outpatient, and community health care services (e.g., visiting nurses; home health aides; physicians; specialty programs for HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, STDs, or tuberculosis [TB]; and prenatal and pediatric care)
- Access to Inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment and mental health services
- Recovery support groups
- Faith-based institutions appropriate for the client population
- Food banks and clothing distribution centers
- Recreational facilities and programs of many types
- Adult education programs, including instruction in adult literacy and English as a second language
- Child care
- Parent training programs
- Volunteer transportation services
- Family therapy and couples counseling
- Housing resources, including U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Section 8 housing, shelters for homeless persons and battered women, and recovery houses
- Legal assistance
Functions
- Provide a core set of social services that includes assessment, planning, linkage, monitoring, and advocacy.
- Provide the client with a single contact person who is responsible for finding and mobilizing needed resources, negotiating formal systems, and bartering informally with other service providers to gain access to appropriate services.
- Respond to client's needs, tailoring resources to the individual rather than fitting the client into existing services.
- Intervene with many systems and providers on behalf of the client.
- Operate in the community and transcend facility boundaries.
- Focus on pragmatic, immediate ways to meet needs (e.g., clothing, shelter).
- React sensitively and competently to clients' ethnic, gender, and cultural differences.
Qualifications and Roles of Case Managers
- Many IOP programs hire professionally trained case managers, such as social workers or counselors whose sole function is case management. Other IOP programs may expect treatment counselors to assume case management responsibilities as well as counseling duties. In some programs, peer counselors or indigenous workers augment the work of professional staff members.
- Case managers in IOP programs develop and maintain an accurate list of local and regional services that clients may need.
- Case managers facilitate transfers to other treatment services as dictated by the clients' needs.
- Case managers in IOP programs participate in developing written memorandums of understanding and interagency agreements to ensure that these documents specify services offered, staff qualifications, number of available slots, costs, lines of authority, and referral procedures.
Models
- Single agency model. Case managers personally establish relationships with counterparts in other agencies to find and access services for individual clients.
- Informal partnership model. Staff members from several agencies link into collaborative teams or networks that consult about individual cases and share services.
- Formal consortium model. Case managers and service providers are joined through written agreements or contracts that define roles, responsibilities, shared services, and costs. This model usually is organized by a lead agency that has primary responsibility and receives most or all of the funding.