May newsletter: PIE in practice
PIE in practice (the post for the clinical perfectionist on your team), plus a heads up on summer cohorts opening June 1.
Notes from the field
The Blog
Notes from the field on trauma-informed practice, assessments, behavioral health, and the work of clinical social work in Colorado and beyond.
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Person-in-Environment is the most underrated assessment tool in social work
If you went through an MSW program, you can recite PIE Theory cold. Then you went into practice and discovered nobody talks about it in supervision. Here is the case for putting it back, and what it actually catches that symptom-only thinking misses.
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What the evidence says about group therapy, and how to find a group worth your time
Group therapy is one of the more underused mental health interventions in the United States. Clinicians refer to it less often than individual therapy, and clients often arrive at the idea of a group skeptical of whether sitting in a room with other people will help them with something they think of as private. The…
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Understanding HCBS Waivers: Essential Guide for Families
Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services waivers keep people out of nursing facilities. The assessment that determines eligibility is more clinical, and more consequential, than most families realize. Here is what to expect and how to prepare.
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Three documentation habits that protect you in supervision, audit, and court
Most clinicians learn documentation by watching other clinicians document. That is how bad habits propagate. Here are three habits that consistently hold up under board investigation, audit, and litigation.
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What “trauma-informed care” actually looks like in the room
Trauma-informed care has become a buzzword, often hung on a wall as a value statement and rarely operationalized. Here is what the recent evidence base says it actually looks like in practice.
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What I am seeing when MSW students use AI for their notes
Generative AI is in every MSW program now, whether the program acknowledges it or not. As a field instructor and supervisor, here is what I am seeing in the notes, what the literature is saying, and where the real risk is.
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Why your Plan section is the part of the SOAP note that fails you
Most clinicians spend the bulk of their charting time on Subjective and Objective. The Plan, the section a regulator or attorney reads first, gets a one-liner. That is where defensible documentation falls apart, and how to fix it.
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What a trauma-informed psychosocial assessment actually does
Trauma-informed has become a phrase people use to mean almost anything. Here is what it means in an assessment, and what it changes about the document the next person reads.