Five Great Podcasts for Hospital Social Workers

The Social Work Podcast
The Healthcare Policy Podcast
Patient Engagement Podcast
This Won’t Hurt A Bit
Show About Race

Social workers in the healthcare setting should listen to these five great podcasts for hospital social workers. In the hospital setting, a social worker often links patients and families to community services, provides counseling about the patient’s diagnosis and offers psycho-social support to patients and families. Each of these podcasts offers helpful information that hospital social workers can put into practice.

The Social Work Podcast

The Social Work Podcast is hosted by Jonathan Singer Ph.D., LCSW, who is a professor at the Loyola University in Chicago. This podcast focuses on sharing social work information in a format that is accessible to people in related professions, such as nursing, psychiatry and education. Some of the topics include confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety and how to help people who are suicidal. The Social Work Podcast also includes topics on counseling, therapy and access to resources.

The Healthcare Policy Podcast

The Healthcare Policy Podcast focuses on policies related to healthcare. Although it is not specifically about social work, a social worker who is employed at a hospital will find its topics beneficial to their everyday work. Hosted by David Introcaso, it focuses on how policies affect the care that patients receive in the hospital environment. Some of the topics include Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and pending legislation that could affect a person’s access to care.

Patient Engagement Podcast

The Patient Engagement Podcast focuses on how healthcare providers are able to engage and communicate with their patients. This would be helpful for a hospital social worker because it focuses on what hospital professionals can do in order to get people to be partners in their own healthcare. Some of the topics include patient education techniques, how to make hospital websites and information portals easier to use and how healthcare social media channels and pages can do more in order to engage with patients.

This Won’t Hurt A Bit

This Won’t Hurt A Bit is a podcast that takes a look at the human experience in the hospital setting. It uses a lot of humor in order to explore the patient experience and patient interactions with the people and technology in the hospital environment. It is a good one for a hospital social worker to listen to because it offers tips and strategies on how to communicate with people. Although the podcast is hosted by physicians, patients are often the guests for the interviews. This Won’t Hurt A Bit offers topics such as holiday mishaps in the home and in the hospital and how to talk about death and dying to patients and their families.

Show About Race

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare social workers provide case management in order to help people address barriers to getting the healthcare they need. The Show About Race podcast addresses race and racism as a social barrier. A person’s race is well-known to be a barrier for access to care, with African Americans not being taken seriously when they report pain and not being referred for the same types of diagnostic testing as people of other racial groups. Social workers who are in hospitals serving diverse populations or in under-served communities should listen to the Show About Race podcasts in order to learn how to address race-related barriers to healthcare.

These podcast episodes take about 20 to 60 minutes. Most of these podcasts are updated weekly, and they have hundreds of archived episodes available. Listening to these five great podcasts for hospital social workers is a worthwhile use of time when exercising, commuting or taking a coffee break.