Accountability standards are used to measure an agency’s compliance with
the rules and regulations that govern their practice. These standards
are set forth by legislators, ethics boards, funding sources, and
licensing boards. The main purpose of these standards is to ensure that
clients receive the highest level of care.
In this assignment, you will assess the influence of accountability
standards on human services work. This exercise will sharpen your
ability to recognize the importance of accountability in human services
work in addition to encouraging you to process the related challenges in
meeting the standards.
Tasks:
Write a 2- to 3-page essay on the influence of accountability standards,
leadership style, and diversity of an organization. In the essay,
discuss the following:
?Discuss how standards of care influence direct services.
?Discuss the influence these standards have on how leaders of agencies
manage daily operations in an agency.
?Discuss the influence of accountability standards on the satisfaction
of direct service workers in addition to how this might influence how
the workers relate with the managers of the agency.
Submission Details:
?By Wednesday, March 5, 2014, prepare a 2- to 3-page essay. Your
response should rely upon at least three sources from professional
literature. This may include the University online library resources,
relevant textbooks, peer-reviewed journal articles, and websites created
by professional organizations, agencies, or institutions (.edu, .org, or
.gov). Write in a clear, concise, and organized manner; demonstrate
ethical scholarship inaccurate representation and attribution of
sources (i.e., APA format); and use accurate spelling, grammar, and
punctuation.
?Save your essay in a Microsoft Word document with the name
M4_A2_LastName_FirstInitial.doc,
Module 4 Overview
This module introduces you to the different types of human service
delivery as well as the organizational structures that comprise
agencies. The importance of continuity of care will be discussed, in
particular, making available to clients a wide range of easily
accessible services, whose outcomes can be jointly monitored by the host
agency and affiliate community agencies. This is done within the context
of emphasizing the benefits of networking among human service agencies
to provide their communities access to the highest standard of care. You
will be asked to consider the effects of an agency’s moral ideology,
technology, attitudes of service providers, and how the agency
approaches its clients. This will prepare you to apply these important
principals to your work in the human services arena.
This module will also introduce you to the conflicts and controversies
that influence agency structures from administration to direct service
providers. You will examine these types of conflicts as they apply to
systems’ levels of organizational culture. The emphasis will be on
improving how administrators and direct service providers work together
for the greater goal of serving clients and decreasing imbalance in
systems that often creates negative secondary effects, such as worker
conflict, low employee morale, decreased performance in workers, and low
job satisfaction.
Factors to Consider in Human Services
Think about the various factors you would have to consider if you were
asked to develop a program to address criminal behavior in young males
in an impoverished urban area. You would have to learn about the crime
rates within your target group, the most prevalent criminal activities,
and the current services available for the people to develop the
program. You would have to first consider the benefits to the community
because the details of these benefits are required by the funding source
to grant the funds for your program. The funding source requires the
preprogram data on criminal activities to compare it to the outcomes of
your program. In this way, the funding source gathers data on the
efficacy of the treatment of the population.
The next step in your program development would be to review the current
research on the theoretical approaches used in treating young male
offenders in similar environments. In your prior readings, you learned
that multisystemic therapy (MST) has been effective with the males who
are engaged in crime. This approach requires the involvement of the
client (male offender), family, and other adults in the client’s life,
including teachers and probation officers, from the community. This
approach would also require you to serve the client in the natural
setting, which might be a home, school, or a criminal justice system.
Your staff would require transportation facilities to serve the client.
The staff members should be efficient and trained in the MST approach to
work with clients. This means that you would have to reimburse them for
mileage, provide the necessary technology to sustain a mobile office,
and pay for their training in MST if they are not already trained in
this approach. These are some of the factors you will have to consider
as you engage in the development of your program.
This example illustrates the influence of different factors on the way
programs are developed, the manner in which a theoretical approach is
utilized, and the type of clients the agency serves. There are various
factors, including cost, need, and the community, that should be
considered when attempting to fund and run a program for serving a
specific client population and community.
Looking Ahead in Human Services
The human services field will face many demands for change in the next
several decades, which will be the result of trends in the field that
have begun to emerge. These trends include expectations of high service
delivery standards, changing client demographics and cultural diversity,
growing reach of poverty, changes in funding patterns, evolution of
social policy, and competition in the market.
In the next decade, agencies will have to prepare for the effects of
diversity among staff and clients, robust laws, and regulations that
govern their operations, and competition for their funding to survive in
the growing marketplace. In addition, the agencies will have to accept
high levels of scrutiny through oversight by governing bodies and
funding sources for their services. These services include how agencies
provide and document services, allocate funding they receive, and manage
operations and staff to remain compliant with the relevant
accountability standards implemented by local, state, and federal
governing bodies. These industry trends are, primarily, in place to
improve the standard of care that clients receive. The trends also
promote efforts among professionals to remain competent by holding them
accountable to comply with the standards of care that will make them
eligible to receive funding for their services.
In addition, changes in health-care policy, the need for more services
for children with specialized needs, such as Autism, economic changes,
and education policy changes are all likely to result in an increase in
referrals to human services agencies. Human services professionals will
have to be prepared to manage the influx of referrals, which will
require acquisition of funding, training of staff, and greater
administrative oversight of new programs and services. The
administrators of these agencies will be leading the efforts of agencies
responding to the changing needs of diverse client populations.
Conclusion
The different theoretical approaches to providing human services have
evolved over time. Some are historical and still in use while others
have been developed or adapted to the changing needs of client
populations. Systems theory is a beneficial approach to working with
clients in human service agencies to ensure that comprehensive care is
provided. The systems approach is applied in a different form in
agencies when resolving issues related to the dynamics of working
relationships among staff members.
There are many other theories, including cognitive behavioral,
multisystemic, and solution-focused, used by agencies and direct service
providers. These depend on the client populations being served and the
education and training of the service providers. The implementation of
these treatment theories has recently been influenced by the
requirements of funding sources to utilize theories that produce
evidence-based outcomes for their effectiveness.
Regardless of the selected approach, most agencies work to provide a
continuum of care to their clients by arranging interdisciplinary
meetings among different staff members serving the client as well as
with agencies that also might be providing services to the same client.
The different theories used to provide services will likely continue to
evolve as factors in the changing environment and influence how clients
will access these services.
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