First Case Presentation

Have you ever had to make a case presentation in front of a group of your peers and supervisors?

The other week, I had to do just that in front of the other (25) social work interns in my hospital and their respective supervisors.

The case presentation was supposed to be based upon a client with whom one had some sort of challenge to overcome and/or a question to ask of the social work group as a whole. As a result, I chose to focus on a client whose recent behavior had triggered in me emotions of a past traumatic event.

For this case presentation, we (all the social workers) were given the following broad outline with a detailed listing of the information that would typically be provided under each heading:

Identifying data
Presenting problem
History of the presenting problem
Significant medical/psychiatric history
Significant personal and/or social history
Impressions and summary
Recommendations

Based upon this outline, I went ahead and put together the first draft of my case presentation and then emailed it to my supervisor for her review only to find out that I needed to put together my presentation in a slightly different format under the below mentioned headings:

Identifying data
Past and present psychiatric history
Family history
Presenting problem
Treatment goals and objectives
Course of treatment and intervention strategy
Defenses, transference and counter-transference
Impressions and summary

The rationale for this change in direction was that I am a social work intern in the outpatient mental health clinic and therefore my case presentation should be much more clinically focused than those provided by social work interns working in other departments of the hospital who were not providing long-term therapeutic interventions but were more involved in either emergency type interventions, discharge planning activities and case management.

This explanation makes total sense… and I have to say that I learned so much from putting together this case presentation that the “redoing” process was well worth it.

In particular, it was having to work on the section about the course of treatment and intervention strategy that illustrated to me how much knowledge and experience I have managed to gain during my placement (not that I don’t have still much to learn and grow).

This is because it forced me to review all the session notes I had with my client so that I could see which strategies I had applied (and when) throughout the treatment, as well as the client’s responses to those strategies. In essence, I had to take both a deeper look in to the work I had conducted with the client, as well as a bigger picture view – something that I had not done up until that moment.

Thankfully, my case presentation was received well!

To ensure confidentiality, I will not discuss any of the specifics of my case but will share the two questions I had posed to the group.  One question was what steps do they take to address situations where a personal traumatic event is triggered by something that a client does or shares. I also asked for guidance on what suggestions they had in helping me make an anticipated difficult termination process with a client less painful.

To cope with a client triggering personal events, they recommended talking with your respective supervisors and therapists (and later trusted peers). In addition, they suggested to try to be as aware as possible of your feelings so that they do not interfere with your work with your clients.

To make the termination process with my client easier, my peers and their respective supervisors suggested that I start the termination process sooner rather than later, thereby giving the client more time to adjust and process, and that I arrange to have the client start engaging in the transition plan (moving to a support group and working with another therapist) while I am still present so as to still have access to me as opposed to making the transition after I leave.

Have you had the experience of making a case presentation? Is this something pretty typical or unusual for social workers? Do you tend to find them growing experiences? Please share your comments and thoughts below. I really appreciate them 🙂

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